I know exactly what modern Java looks like, and it could be beautiful. But… legacy cruft and lazy devs make it painful. And tech debt, let’s be honest.
I’d view a greenfield project rather differently, but those are unicorns.
I think if your project is so performance-critical that small runtime changes can cause performance issues, Java (or any other garbage-collected language) isn't a good choice. That's not the case for the vast majority of projects.