[p8]

Nobody cares about performance if you build a business application with a couple of users, a common use-case in 2005. The reason a lot of Java people jumped on the Rails bandwagon, was that an application that would take a month to build in Java with Spring/Hibernate, would take a day in Rails. See also: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beyond-java/0596100949/

[pjmlp]

Some Java people did, there is a reason why Ruby is hardly used outside Rails, while Java rules most of the backend workloads, a mobile OS, and plenty of embedded workloads.

[p8]

There's also a reason Kotlin has become the language of choice for the Android development industry, Scala became a thing, and ThoughtWorks recommended against using JavaServerFaces.