With the possible exception of Erlang/BEAM, none of the candidates for "better" of OP cited ever (ever) actually got tested in the field -at scale- to see if it actually delivers the goods. So it is merely an elitist opinion of a niche subset that apparently thinks its take on these matters is beyond question. Gabriel wrote his essay about two actually deployed alternatives, with the "worse" option (UNIX) coming on top. LISP was in fact the incumbent and UNIX the scrappy upstart. None of the OPs cites were incumbents. They are just simply exceptionally safe bets to high horse on.
Also agreed: Java and JVM are were not the "worse is better" options at the time of adoption. Hype alone did not create the massive shift to Java that occurred in late 90s. It was a genuinely positive development for the practice and people were getting results. It was Java's 2nd act of moving into "enterprise" (and Sun's mismanagement of that effort) that created its current sense of 'heaviness' of language.
People who designed Java are on the record expressing elitist reasons for Java's success and design goals. It boils down to: Java classes allow code monkeys to write spaghetti code that is forced to stay inside classes designed by others.
The reason I always hated Java was because it was designed by good programmers for bad programmers in a looking down at them way, not a good programmers for themselves to use.
btw. Java design team licensed the Oberon compiler sources years before to study it.
People that profess Java heaviness only reveal lack of historical background.
Not only were CORBA and DCOM much worse, Java EE was the reboot of Objective-C framework for distributed computing at Sun. And those Objective-C lengthy methods are quite the pleasure to type without code completion.
While they certainly could have done better, it was already an huge improvement.
For most IT programmers (who were now the Java coders) CORBA was esoterica. So the JEE specs were never appreciated for their clarity and the necessary abstractions were deemed as "ceremony". Sun did a great job on the specs. They dropped the ball on (a) the pedogogical front (your precise point actually), and (b) crippling JEE specs to induce the likes of IBM to invest in J2EE app server development.
Also agreed: Java and JVM are were not the "worse is better" options at the time of adoption. Hype alone did not create the massive shift to Java that occurred in late 90s. It was a genuinely positive development for the practice and people were getting results. It was Java's 2nd act of moving into "enterprise" (and Sun's mismanagement of that effort) that created its current sense of 'heaviness' of language.