> Java has some kind of traits now through interfaces so it's not much of a problem today.

Well that's the article's premise, right? Opening sentence:

    Java is good by modern standards, from a technical perspective

Later on:

    Java’s culture eschews common sense approaches

> so it's not much of a problem today.

Every Java codebase I've worked on in my career has had plenty of this crap in it. The culture has settled on doing it this way.