Unless Kotlin decides to stop following JVM capabilities and interoperability with modern Java features, those capabilities need to exist in Android as well.
Otherwise, the JVM Kotlin libraries won't have a place on Android, unless they get coded twice, with Kotlin's version of #ifdef.
Google's surprise decision to update Java support to core Java 11 LTS, was most likely triggered by the Java ecosystem now basing on Java 11 LTS as the minimum version, and they want to keep those libraries somehow available on Android.
Actually, "desugaring" is a thing. It's a backport of those new parts of the standard library that the dex converter inserts into your app. Currently, it's only Java 8, but I had no trouble building an app that uses Java 17. You just can't use any features that rely on new classes or methods, like records. But purely syntactical ones do work flawlessly.
I don't like Kotlin because of how much it tries to do in the language itself with maximally terse syntax, and because of its asinine defaults like final-by-default classes and immutable-by-default everything. Java's sugar is much better thought out.
