"Java is not an innovative language" does not mean "Java was never an innovative language".

I get the feeling Java seems to have suffered from its early success, pioneering things like generics in GC languages, which competitors like C# were able to do better, but only because Microsoft decided to break compatibility between .NET 1 and .NET 2 or because there was no compatibility to break. After that, the language seems to have shyed away from innovation out of fear of breaking things for a long time.

In recent years, this has changed, but Java has a lot of language features to catch up on. Project Loom (green threading without coloured functions) is the first innovative thing I've seen Java do in recent history.

Java has done many nice things, but "pioneering things like generics in GC languages," wasn't one of them.

Here is a list of GC languages with generics that predated Java:

CLU, ML, Standard ML, Caml Light, OCaml, Miranda, Haskell, Sather, Eiffel, Modula-2+, Modula-3.

that was 30 years ago? New Java developers have been born after the original inception and learned the language long after. Reputations change over time.

Core Java was staunchly against incorporating any functional features while the rest of the ecosystem was innovating

Sure, because Java isn't a functional language. Taking a wait-and-see approach to whether the style of programming will be a fad is defensible choice when you have to support it forever. And it kind of was a fad. The only thing that really came of it in most mainstream langages is passing functions as arguments. I've yet to encounter a code-base in the wild that's actually functional.

What does functional mean to you? From my POV I see lots of features in Java coming from the functional programming world, but perhaps I have a different understanding of the term to what you do.