The Java authors were quite open about their absolute preference for Lisp, and their distaste for OO.
That Gosling did not fully understand features cribbed from other languages is evident from how broken the Java version of those features are.
Surprising opinion given that Java is heavily based on Objective-C.
https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
As for your reference to Guy Steel, he was just one person on a large team, which besides the point above was full of ex Smalltalk and SELF people as well.
Maybe learn properly about the Java history?
Gosling and others have written plenty of code in Java themselves, plenty of Solaris tooling was migrated to Java (a fact that Bryan Cantrill has complained often in his talks), and it replaced their OpenSTEP efforts, with Java EE being a rewrite from Distributed Objects Everywhere, originally written in Objective-C.