I've had the same experience in Java. Experienced engineers that are learning "new" Java even though those features came out years ago. I really think this will be the case for any language. Most people are not the HN type that are going to live and breath programming.
I'll probably get down voted, but I honestly really enjoy Java. The language, while it has some legacy verbosity, is in my opinion the perfect balance of simplicity and complexity. It has just enough language features without becoming Scala/Rust/C++ levels of complexity, while still being competitive on performance.
