Erik, many of your points are well-taken. However, there are things for which you are not accounting. For example, Java is not only a programming language. It is a huge open source ecosystem with countless libraries of useful functionality to tap into. Having 40+ years of commercial software development experience, I would hate to lose the use of that body of solid code, tested, maintained and supported by non-commercial open source teams.
Much of today's enterprise application development involves understanding what libraries are available and plumbing them into your own custom code. The cost of development would be unsupportable without them. More modern languages like Kotlin are available that can still make use of that huge Java ecosystem because they run on the same JVM.
I agree that containers need to be lightweight to enable automated failover and scaling. I think you might be amazed at how lightweight you can make a container using Alpine Linux and loading only the Java libraries required by your container.
