I would have to agree with this -- I work with a lot of large telecoms and nearly all of them use Java for any back-end services that need scale. Sure, Java is insanely verbose syntactically; but that has the side-effect of forcing you to formally model your application architecture in order to generate stub code. The unfriendliness of Java is just managed through tooling that presents a simplified interface to developers. It's easy enough to wrap a JVM in a container to work with Kubernetes or arbitrary cloud services, so many of the operational aspects of working with the JVM are greatly simplified.
Moreover, Java on the web (first in the form of JSPs, later Spring-based frameworks) was largely a reaction the shortcomings of LAMP, which was largely a reaction to the shortcomings of Perl5 CGI-BIN (what I consider to be the first widely-used web framework). The great irony is that Perl had an advanced dependency management system in CPAN in the mid-1990s and PHP had nothing for years. Ruby on Rails succeeded largely by combining a CPAN-like dependency management system with a web-native development framework.
Moreover, Java on the web (first in the form of JSPs, later Spring-based frameworks) was largely a reaction the shortcomings of LAMP, which was largely a reaction to the shortcomings of Perl5 CGI-BIN (what I consider to be the first widely-used web framework). The great irony is that Perl had an advanced dependency management system in CPAN in the mid-1990s and PHP had nothing for years. Ruby on Rails succeeded largely by combining a CPAN-like dependency management system with a web-native development framework.