I used to think that same thing

I recently found a very smart fellow who has been writing translations of a small Scala "expression interpreter" with monads and what.

But in Java. I kid you not.

He wrote it in JDK 8 Java (pretty far from Scala)

Then updated with JDK 15 features Java (getting closer)

I made a rough pass at JDK17 Java using records and ADTs (sealed types) with pattern match "switch" and the net result is an almost verbatim translation.

https://github.com/Randgalt/expressive-java/issues/1

There is one ugly line which JDK18 will fix, "destructuring in pattern captures/match".

See "Deconstruction Patterns" at bottom of page here:

https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/405