Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knoledge. For gaining wide propagation in a niche, whether of habitat or market, being the paragon of what can be conceived is rarely the way to optimize success. There are many other factors, and technical merit is lightly pondered.
That's true for life, where there are numerous examples where a function is filled by an organ that evolved in a counter manner of what an engineer sense of elegance/parsimony would provide.
That's also something that happens for technical products, where early proliferation in the market seems to offer a far more successful advantage than excellence of the product.
That said, I never had the opportunity to touch ML, and only already heard about it through my personal research on the roots of Coq that I studied during my CS courses in University. I didn't touched much of Java since I left University. Last year I worked on an SDK provided for several languages, including Java, so it gave me the opportunity to look at how it evolved, and play with its integration of functional paradigm. That still requires far too much boilerplate code to my gust, but is bit less frustrating in how you can structure your code.