Really Java has always been kinda okay - the really horrible part of Java was always the "enterprise OOP" programming patterns that were basically a given in any commercial codebase - little things like pointing out the verbosity of a basic single file project are just shorthand for "look at all this shit people have written".
As the adage goes - Java programmers can write Java in any language.
You mean stuff like in the 'Design Patterns' book by the Gang of Four? That was originally written for C++ programmers and predates Java by a few years.
Seems 'Java programmers' were already writing Java before Java's release ;)
Afaik, at the time issue was a lot of programming in xml - where those frameworks are configured in various xmls and hard to understand and maintain. Reflection based frameworks are later development.
The massive amounts of indirection which the IDE wouldn’t help you understand was the difficult thing. What encoding you use for that is pretty irrelevant. JSON would have been worse.
The indirection in Java itself matter significantly less, because you ctrl+click and it gets you where the things are. Plus auto completion. Both were part if Eclipse years and years ago.
The problem with xml was that IDEs were unable to help you.
As the adage goes - Java programmers can write Java in any language.