What Java apps became popular, other than Minecraft? The only things that got used were tools from companies like Cisco and IBM which everyone detested using.
How about JetBrains’s entire suite of IDEs? They are Java (well, now probably mostly Kotlin, but still JVM) based and cross-platform and as a user of those and previously Vi/Emacs for three decades I can say totally belong in my toolkit.
I begrudgingly use IDEA because for some languages I cannot get nearly the same level of productivity with better tools, such as Vim or Sublime. But that doesn't mean I like using the damned thing. As soon as I can ditch it, I will and I do. Same goes for all the Electron rubbish.
Every time I have to wait a few seconds after clicking on something trivial, like the File top-level menu, I remind myself of how much my Intel i7 can do in 1 second, and my disdain for Java and Electron apps only increases.
I don't know if Windows or Mac OS have a battery usage chart by app, like Android does, with warnings for badly written software. If they don't, they should add it. Maybe that would clue more people in.
"I begrudgingly use IDEA because for some languages I cannot get nearly the same level of productivity with better tools" Hmm. That's an oddly worded complaint.
I have used VI (and successors) since 1988, and Emacs since 1990, and have tried many other IDEs through the years (Eclipse, NetBeans, Sublime, VS Code, Atom, and tons of others). My go-to are the IDEs from JetBrains now, except for Common Lisp and Haskell (Emacs, although Haskell may be changing). Clojure, Java, Scala, Python, Ruby, Go, SQL, JavaScript, C#, F#, and many others, are all supported in one IDE (IDEA) or in multiple (my personal preference).
I personally have no performance problems with JetBrains IDEs, but maybe I have tuned them up after years of using them... (Or tuned down my expectations? Can't really say offhand.)