[repolfx]

All languages can benefit from a good IDE. It's not related to the language. However very few languages actually have good IDEs, either because they are designed in ways that are hostile to static analysis (scripting langs) or because they just don't invest in tooling (Go, Rust).

Kotlin is unusual because JetBrains invested heavily in their IDE support from the start and developed it hand in hand with their plugin, so there's nothing in the language that is hard to statically analyse in a fast way.

As a Kotlin user it makes it a very pleasant language to develop in. You should try it.

As for IDE agnostic language servers, I think you'll find they find it hard to compete with IntelliJ or similar advanced IDEs simply because the "protocol" for classical IDEs is very fast, high throughput and complex object APIs. The featureset of something like IntelliJ is enormous and they can iterate very quickly. It'll be a long time until there is strong competition to it especially with a standards based out of process server-type design.