As a disclaimer, I've done PHP (WP, Laravel, custom), Javascript (Node, JS, TS, back-end, front-end, full-stack) and Ruby, so I'm speaking from my experience.
Hackernews hasn't been hacker news since 2015, when it started being about the books bill gates is reading, or what Elon Musk had for breakfast. It's vanity fair for nerds.
Yeah, Java works. You have to sneak up on Kotlin to make it do anything. Also, when you have questions, the java community is a lot better. The Kotlin community is made up of the same tweed jacket wearing losers that were doing rails back in the day.
There isn't really that much good content anymore... So it really is easy nowadays. A few years ago I used to constantly have to be saving stuff to read later... but now it is constantly just non-tech related crap, unfortunately.