I must admit my experience is a few years old, but one thing that the whole text doesn't mention and that has contributed a lot to the negativity I feel towards the java ecosystem: It seemed not well integrated in the Linux ecosystem.
What do I mean? I often experienced that Java dependencies were not readily available in Linux distros. Packaging Java stuff was - weird and complicated, not sure how to better phrase it.
For Python/Ruby/PHP you usually can rely on the fact that major libraries are properly packaged. For Java not so much.
Because Java distributes applications as bundles including the libraries (fat JARs, WAR files and so on), libraries need to be available to the builder, not the installer. That means it's perfectly sound that they're in Maven Central (and competitors), and not in the OS's package manager. It's the same with packages in JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Erlang, etc.
The only things you might need to install through OS packages are the JVM, and perhaps an application server if you're doing things that way, which fewer and fewer people are.
When i first started working with Java on unix, i felt the same way as you - i wanted the libraries to come through the OS package manager, the same way native libraries do, and spent ages trying to get my deployed applications to use them. Eventually i realised i was just doing it completely wrong.
Python, Ruby, JavaScript etc all have their own dependency repositories and packaging systems. Java does too. It's not Java that's the problem here, it's the Linux distros that insist on packaging everything themselves (almost always badly).
You could if you really wanted to just auto-convert Maven Central to DEBs. The metadata is there. The problem is that "dependency hell" would then visit you in the same way it does for Linux apps. Upgrading libraries is something that should either be done by developers, or by OS vendors very carefully, not by having some random part time packager run a script and push a new version that immediately propagates down to everyone else without any app-compat testing.
I think that's a fair point. I bet part of it is due to licensing. The choice on whether or not to use OpenJDK is not trivial, and I surmise that distro managers just avoid the issue completely (I would).
You can rely on ruby packages being properly packaged? Ahahahaahaha. They package what is necessary for the end user apps (like redmine) that they support, and a very bare minimum of other gems. Then you are stuck trying to match their release of updated versions with the ones you use. That seldom matches the update speed you will want, for neither ruby versions nor gem versions.
What do I mean? I often experienced that Java dependencies were not readily available in Linux distros. Packaging Java stuff was - weird and complicated, not sure how to better phrase it.
For Python/Ruby/PHP you usually can rely on the fact that major libraries are properly packaged. For Java not so much.