I work in the Analytics space and been mostly on Java and I am so glad that other people feel the same.
At this point, people have become afraid of suggesting something other than Spark.
I see something written in Rust to be much better at problems like this.
I love the JVM but it works well with transactional workloads and starts showing its age when its dealing with analytical loads.
The worst thing is then people start doing weak references and weird off the heap processing usually by a senior engineer but really defeats the purpose of the JVM