gosh, pythonistas must have called you really bad names.
JVM wanted to be Self, but Sun was on its last legs by then. now it's just a weird historic artifact, still casting a shadow, or at least causing an unpleasant smell.
I'm curious about the masters-have-left claim: do you really thing current Python action is somehow foolish?
I don't know about "foolish", but the current efforts adding complex threading and a JIT that promises 30% speedup over 3.10 look misguided.
Before, the selling point was simplicity and C extensions.
Just go to GitHub: Apart from the people who are paid to integrate the above features development has all but stalled. The corporate takeover of the "free" software Python (without a standard or viable other implementations like C++) is complete!
Python was never a good language. It was always a joke. But jokes have a short shelf life. The reason to use it was to be in the opposition to the pompous way of how the mainstream was trying to do things.
It's like with academic drawing. A student would spend countless hours or even days trying to draw a model, and would still come out with broken anatomy, made of plaster and not even a bit similar to the model itself. And they would use a huge arsenal of tools, and probably some expensive ones. While a master could scoop some ash from an ashtray, and in a few lines drawn by a finger accomplish a lot more than that student's day's work, and have the model look alive, with plausible anatomy etc.
Python was the ash from an ashtray. It didn't need to be good as a tool to accomplish its goal. Actually, the opposite. But now, with the masters gone, the students don't know why the masters were so good at it, and they try to copy whatever they did, including finger drawing with ash. It works even worse than if they used their huge arsenal of tools, but they no longer have anyone to guide them.
You might think this is a ridiculous story, but this actually happened before my eyes in academic drawing in a particular art academy. But it's a story for a different time.
So, to answer your question, with some examples:
Yes, Python today is thousand times worse than what it was 15 years ago. In general, adding to a programming language makes it worse. Python not only adds, it adds useless garbage. Stuff like f-strings, match-case, type annotations, type classes, async... all this stuff made the language a lot more complex and added nothing of value.
Lots of Python libraries were burnt in a name of "progress" (broken backwards-compatibility). Making tools for Python became prohibitively expensive due to the effort it takes to work with the language.
But, it didn't stop there. The community itself changed its shape dramatically. Python, from being usually the second language, learnt by someone intelligent enough to see the problems with the mainstream and looking for alternatives, it became the first language programmers learn on their way into trade. Python more and more started to bend to meet the demands of its new audience: the unwilling to learn amateurs. And that's where Java was good! Java was made for exactly this purpose. Java came packed with guard-rails and walking sticks.
JVM wanted to be Self, but Sun was on its last legs by then. now it's just a weird historic artifact, still casting a shadow, or at least causing an unpleasant smell.
I'm curious about the masters-have-left claim: do you really thing current Python action is somehow foolish?