Not really. It just another language, but, IMHO, threads have gotten A LOT better through Kotlin’s Coroutines. That said, the libraries have gotten a lot better and the new UI toolkit, Compose, addresses a lot of shortcomings, but it’s still early.
Kotlin has a lot of features aimed at mitigating the pain of working with Java APIs, such as extension functions. So you can sort of fix the API in a library or in your own code. (But it doesn't help with the lifecycle or reducing the number of layers.)
my main pain point with it was more the API rather than Java (e.g. the activity lifecycle, the 20 layers of compatibility stuff, contexts everywhere)
did this clear some of that up?