> A few years back the same argument was phrased as "we don't adopt features from lesser languages" or something to that effect. Since then Java has been busy adopting those features at an accelerated pace.

Except it wasn't, because adopting ML features, especially lambdas and generics, were discussed in the Java team even before Java was released.

Also, the "accelerated pace" is only compared to a dry spell where development stagnated not by choice but by Sun's problems. We had a pace we liked, then we were forced to slow down, and now we're back to the pace we like again.

Also, it has always been a stated strategy to focus on innovation more in the runtime than in the language (Gosling called it "a wolf in sheep's clothing"). Java has always aimed to innovate in compiler technology, garbage collection, and telemetry as fast as it could, and we innovate faster than most in these areas.

> And Java is no longer a smaller language.

No longer smaller than what? We aim to keep the language relatively small, i.e. smaller than mainstream languages that are more eager to add features. So Java is bigger than Go, but it's smaller than C# or Kotlin or Rust, and is roughly comparable to TS or Swift in its "size".