Not answering your primary question, I know. But I wonder where you are getting the "Java is Dead" sentiment - I am not getting it at all in my (web/enterprisey) circle, if anything there is a lot of excitement due to new LTS versions and other JVM languages like Kotlin. And I am also finding a lot of gratitude for the language not changing in drastic ways (can you imagine a Python 2->3 like transition?) despite the siren call of fancy new PL features.
Maybe it's just a little cliche and maybe the phrase "XXX is Dying" is too easily thrown around for click-bait and hyperbole. It can probably be applied to any language that isn't garnering recent fandom. You could probably just as easily say, "Is C# dead?" or "Is Ruby on Rails dead?" or "Is Python dead?" or "Is Rust dead?" (kidding on those last ones).
And yes, I'm with you. I'm super excited about the changes to the Java language, and the JVM continues to be superior for many workloads. Hotspot is arguably one of the best virtual machines that exists today.
But there are plenty of "Java is dead" blog posts and comments here on HN to substantiate my original viewpoint. Maybe because I make a living with Java, I have a bias towards those articles but filter out others, so I don't have a clean picture of this sentiment and it's more in my head.
Java has never been more alive really. All the other JVM languages just strengthen and retrench JVM, it all deploys the same. And Java itself has really come a long long ways since the JDK7 days.
