Minecraft Java Edition IMO has this giant community because it is easy to mod and this is because of Java since the devs did not create modding tools. I am sure it was much easy for one person to develop such a complex game in a manged language too , from my experience with desktop apps the ones I made in Adobe AIR using AS3 had a lot fewer bugs and fewer support tickets and we got cross platform too.

I also worked on a Java screen sharing in browser web conference solution back when this was not possible with native stuff or with Flash, if you understood the language you could get good performance.