My recent java experience is that you end up having to tune it and keep multiple versions and screw around a bunch if you’re doing more than one thing with it. Stick to Android dev and it’ll be fine after the initial config, but switch to something else or try to run some GUI java project off Github and you’ll lose time configuring it. I “nope” out of a lot of Java stuff as soon as I see it’s Java, as a result. If anything the situation seems a little worse than it was in, say, the ‘00s.
I sympathize with your problems, I also had to juggle multiple versions for a period of time on multiple projects. Docker thankfully eliminated that and even without it the most you have to do now days is to point "$JAVA_HOME" to another folder. Java and it's ecosystem is better than ever and the language updates since java 8 are great to work with. The JVM is great. Spring boot finally removed most of the the multiple days config issues. Everything is mature, every problem has one or more library to solve it.
