Java was originally planned as a “wolf in sheep clothes”, bringing the best ideas of lisp and smalltalk (GC, memory safety, dynamic linking), and selling it to C++ devs. While these were not new per se, they were new to “the average developer”. And I would even go as far to claim that GC is perhaps the biggest productivity/safety boost our industry has seen, single handedly.
And they continue to introduce new ML features in the form of pattern matching, ADT, etc.
I think sometimes these languages get unfairly evaluated.
It's weird to me that it's the stubborn languages that seem to make it through.