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The latest LTS version is JDK17 (e.g. records and switch expressions) and has been for long enough to be production ready. I reckon half of the people on this forum didn't even work in software when JDK8 was released.

Yes, Kotlin/Scala would stop driving you crazy. No, I don't see nearly enough Bay Area companies deprecating Java in their favor for new services :( They are probably betting on the next LTS to come soon enough (with pattern matching and hopefully Loom).