Even if we postulate that he fear is unwarranted and irrational, the fear is still real, based on Oracles history of lawsuits, and so the explanation still holds.
Java is possibly the safest bet on the future, it's open source both in spec and in the most common implementation (OpenJDK), and is so widely used that there are multiple FAANG companies critically dependent on Java working that alone could continue the development of the platform were anything happen.
Besides, Oracle has been a surprisingly good steward of the language.
Running Java is not remotely the same as copying the API interface of the whole standard library and providing an alternative implementation, just to avoid paying Sun, who specifically intended on getting money from mobile usage.
Oracle lost the lawsuit and I do agree with the decision in that APIs should be freely replicated, but let's not pretend that Google was some saint good guy here fighting the good fight, they were just cheap and aggressively capitalistic.
It incredible how far the "Do not evil" marketing won the hearts of computing nerds, Google only got positive karma for doing with Android exactly what Microsoft did with J++.
To this day Android Java is not fully compatible with Java proper, and Kotlin became Google's version of C#.
Come on, that's a completely different story, Google made their own independent SDK using but incompatible with Java. Nobody's arguing you should do that.
Plus last time I checked Oracle lost that lawsuit.