Why use two languages and two different ecosystems for the backend and for the frontend, when we can use only one? It makes hiring a lot easier too.
Let's face it the Java ecosystem is stagnated and has lost a tremendous amount of mindshare in the last 7 years.
The level of modularity that they are trying to achieve has been available in Node since 2009, while all the language features that they are trying to implement are already there in a Typescript in a much better form.
The Java ecosystem did not manage to produce a good frontend development solution, and that was its downfall.
Things like JSF and later GWT did not deliver on the promise of abstracting away the browser for non-frontend developers, and the result is that you have to be both a frontend developer (HTML/CSS/Javascript ) and a Java developer in order to build UIs in Java.