I'm not sure that's quite right. I feel like there was a decent span of time where many desktop apps were written in Java (with AWT or Swing), particularly enterprise apps where you valued development speed and ease of deployment more than a slick UI or high performance.

My $JOB is maintaining such a desktop CRUD app that's been in use for the past 20 years. It uses a Swing (via a proprietary higher-level framework) for its GUI. Over the years it's accreted a few dozen services (also in Java) in its orbit, but the central GUI app and its data-base still remain and continue to be extended as new requirements arise.