Honestly the writing part isn't the problem since Java has fantastic IDE integration. You can write a lot of code pretty quickly. Java is still awful but that is entirely due to how terrible it is to work with an existing large codebase.

If you've ever had to debug or extend old mainframe COBOL applications then you know that working on that sort of Java project feels exactly the same. Everything has been chopped up into a million little pieces so you are never able to step through the code in a straight line. You know you are working on a Java app when you're lost from having too many tabs open.

All subjective. That style has plenty of people who don’t agree with any of your criticisms and could list many of what they consider benefits. It would also be very difficult to prove that extra lines of code have any financial impact, let alone one that could be recovered in a matter of months.

I understand your viewpoint, but I think it's a bit too pessimistic. While we essentially don't know how to consistently write good code and deliver quality products on time (the whole industry, save for some niches, has this problem), it's also improbable that nothing we could try would get us closer to that ideal. Not too close to it, perhaps, and not in a matter of months, and not by simply switching one set of rules of thumb for another, but surely, there's got to be something that can have a noticeable impact. Especially over longer-term and in larger codebases.

Trying to replace X with Y, where both have similar expressive power and similar drawbacks (i.e. FP vs. OOP), won't help much. Not on its own, and not without many other conditions being met, including completely non-technical ones like the personality of a hiring manager. Surely, though, in every paradigm or style, it's possible to write better or worse code, right? So it should also be possible to create an environment where the code quality, on average, would be just a bit better than the norm.

I'm not looking for quick gains for a single project, but rather a medium-term strategy that can save the effort required to develop and maintain products. People who claim to know how to "get good code quick" are mostly swindlers, and it's really hard to confirm causality in practice, but we shouldn't give up on finding ways to get better-than-average results in development.