I would love to see the reverse. Ive never seen a Java codebase that I thought was pleasant to work with, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
However, there's a reason Java is in the top 3 most popular languages. Its pragmatic, it scales, it plays nice with tooling and the language itself is pretty passable.
I'm currently dabbling in Android development, and the few Java libraries I've dealt with, especially Android's own APIs, have been a thorough exercise in frustration, to put it mildly.
Where are the good Java codebases hiding?
Have you looked at JDK itself?
I wonder if those are true reasons. I currently believe in the following set of reasons, in the order of importance: runaway feedback loop of popularity (popularity -> jobs -> popularity), JVM is cross-platform, low cognitive effort per line of code written.