It is just my preference. But your right, java is very "enterprise" hence my trepidation. I think there are much better enterprise worthy languages now, like Go. Which are far easier to develop and maintain.

Or Kotlin. People usually complain about JVM but lots of enterprise software runs on it. Spring boot ecosystem provides lots ready to use libraries. Kotlin can be much easier to use compared to Java. Yes Go can be better language now, but still lacks lots of library and API support. And Rust, I'd rather code in jvm language fast and ship it fast than building up whole infrastructure that takes way more time to implement.

In my main gig we run on kotlin (fintech/accounting saas) and I absolutely despise it, the overhead is massive. But I wouldn't want to write it in golang, we really need proper OOP. It's also so unbearably slow, it's actually impressive. But it is what it is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what would you say is a fast language then?

Golang, Rust, etc.

Also, to be fair, a big part of the slowness is also the tooling, Spring Boot, Hibernate etc. You can mitigate that by using micronaut or exposed/krush, but we only have a microservice running on that. The main business logic is the classic java web stack. Tests, running the app, building takes forever.