I have worked with Java EE (Enterprise Edition) for a few years. Java in the backend is probably the most common one when doing enterprise software.
Lets define it differently: Everything what is not an SAP System and is backend and is not Cobolt, is Java at least for automotive and banking. Automotive -> managing cars, service contracts, financing offers, accessories and for banking -> money management, insurance, contract management etc. You go to a shop and you wanna finance something? Might be a Java backend or Cobolt :D)
Spring/Spring Boot as a Framework got a lot of traction because Java specification process was just way slower and more boilerplate
And yes Oracle got fed up of doing Java for free for too long and if you wanna use an older version of java and still need patches, you will need to pay.
Luckily there is were java actually shows it strength which i have not seen in other languages: You define a specification, you get a reference implementation from someone and then everyone around it starts to build on those specifications.
This allows for different jpa (database access with java) implementations, different application server etc. It also allows for different companies to do their own JVM implementation/maintenance track/version.
From an ecosystem pserpective, the JVM itself (without java) also did a great job and shows how versatile it is. Close to what .net is doing but in a more free version. And you could throw .net/c# into the same similiar category as Java. Language feels similiar and if you are a MS company, you just use C# perhaps. But switching between c# and java is much easier than to other languages.
From all languages i know and worked with, i do like JVM based languages the most. golang is interesting but nothing i would wanna use for a big code base at all. C/C++ i would use if i need to because of tooling features, how you write it and how hard it is to write it good;
Java is fast, java has great tools for a long long time: Great Debugging features, great memory and performance analysis and tools, lots and lots of frameworks and architecture catalog.
PHP is written and used in business context like java but without the benefits of running on the JVM. I don't recommend it. Its not bad, its less boiler plate but its just not a nice well defined well designed language. Most shocking to me was the performance optimizations which were done a few years ago which shows how little interest in that language exists that you can just optimize it that much. What facebook did with PHP was just shitty and weird.
After the next upgrade on arch linux where i had to fix the setup and reinstall some plugins/dependencies we switched to intellij.
Intellij just works :(