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I find it a great improvement. Secure by default.

To me the hate started when Java went from a statically compiled languages, to a half way dynamic language that does a fair bit of compilation at application startup, based on a bunch of annotations. Suddenly many Java projects introduced Ruby-on-Rails level "magic" (yes looking at you Spring(Boot)).

I'm not totally against annotations, but it's easier to over use them just to remove a bit of boiler plate.

To me Kotlin's approach makes more sense: reduce boilerplate by making the language more expressive, adding KClass and KFunction (https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.reflect) while mostly avoiding annotations and exceptions.

Kotlin also has a nice story for immutability.