There's plenty of stuff Java did first (or only) -- an optimising JIT, two new generations of GC (G1, ZGC--a low latency GC with <1ms max pause time), low-overhead deep profiling (Java Flight Recorder) -- but they're all in the runtime. Java's strategy since the beginning has always been to innovate on the platform and be a last-mover on the language, keeping it conservative. .NET seems to follow an opposite strategy.

That's how we've been able to avoid properties and just have algebraic data types, avoid async/await and do virtual threads, avoid string interpolation and just have safe string templates. This also allows us to keep the number of features in the language relatively low -- as we, and most of our users, like it.