Java's biggest strength is that "the worst it can be" is not all that bad, and refactoring tools are quite powerful. Yes, it's wordy and long-winded. Fine, I'd rather work with that than other people's Bash scripts, say. And just because a lot of Java developers have no concept of what memory allocation means, and are happy to pull in hundreds of megabytes of dependencies to do something trivial, then allocate fucking shitloads of RAM for no reason doesn't mean that you have to.

There is a difference in microservices between those set up by a sane architect:

clear data flow and pragmatic service requirements
documented responses and clear failure behaviour
pact server set up for validation in isolation
entire system can be set up with eg. a docker compose file for testing
simple deployment of updates into production and easy rollback

... and the CV-driven development kind by people who want to be able to 'tick the boxes' for their next career move:

let's use Kubernetes, those guys earn a fortune
different pet language for every service
only failure mode is for the whole thing to freeze
deployment needs the whole team on standby and we'll be firefighting for days after an update
graduate developers vibe coding every fucking thing and it getting merged on Claude's approval only

We mostly do the second kind at my work; a nice Java monolith is bliss to work on in comparison. I can see why others would have bad things to say about them too.