I feel like the mistake Java made was ceding the DOM to Javascript. It turned out that users like the browser and didn't particularly want either native widgets or a new system. The browser is familiar and good enough for a vast majority of tasks.
If the JVM had access to the DOM, you could write SPAs in Java and everybody would be happy. Instead Java sealed itself off separately from the browser, and Javascript went from little toys to full-blown UI applications. And then developers wanted to use the same code on both client and server so they made Node, working in the space where Java is so much clearly better.
So we end up with the worse language running the world. Fortunately, JS has finally become a mediocre language (or even a decent one with TS), and here we are.
I think it was just that shipping native apps on a web page was too slow back then for the internet and the machines. For the web to grow, it had to be simple. It took almost 20 years before we looped back to running full applications in the browser
If the JVM had access to the DOM, you could write SPAs in Java and everybody would be happy. Instead Java sealed itself off separately from the browser, and Javascript went from little toys to full-blown UI applications. And then developers wanted to use the same code on both client and server so they made Node, working in the space where Java is so much clearly better.
So we end up with the worse language running the world. Fortunately, JS has finally become a mediocre language (or even a decent one with TS), and here we are.