Same exact experience. I recently tried my hand at rewriting one of my old Java Android projects in Kotlin. Maybe it's just my brain getting older, but I found Kotlin development experience to be far less enjoyable than I was anticipating based on all the high praise.

Don't get me wrong, Kotlin has some nice language improvements, but overall I found it to be more confusing than helpful. A weirdly confusing co-routine implementation, new unintuitive syntax, lots of new keywords, etc.

I dunno. I'm sure it's a fine language if that's what you're starting with, but as a former Java dev that was actually productive, Kotlin was anything but a breath of fresh air.