I find debates over "is language X good or is it bad" to be a particularly subjective topic in programming. Not that there's nothing objective you can say about them, but opinion pieces like these are always rife with personal preferences, and often (like in these two) interspersed with pettiness.
There are still legitimate tradeoffs that can be discussed.
For long, Kotlin has meant way longer compilation times. That's no longer the case (or at least way harder to determine, kotlinc is even faster than javac in some projects) but that was a legitimate bullet to bite 2 years ago.
Sadly I agree with the author of the second article, all the reasons given are very petty and I wonder how much of these 6 months were really spent writing kotlin.
https://twitter.com/computerfact/status/968333338267324417