Most developers of Java I've encountered don't know the first thing about optimization and manage to make some really suboptimal stuff despite the supposed ease

Most developers of Java I've encountered don't know the first thing about optimization and manage to make some really suboptimal stuff despite the supposed ease of achieving near-best performance. I spent a fair amount of time actually benchmarking and iterating on code to make java programs perform better in college, because thankfully they considered that a useful skill. What I see in practice in industry is architectural patterns that supposedly support maintainability at a great cost to performance, with the concrete parts being written by people who don't have any idea what the performance characteristics of the code they're writing are and why. I think Java has a lot of merit, but it also has an "ecosystem" rife with bloated, dogmatic, hyper-abstracted code that was never really given a thought about optimality and requires purchasing big servers with lots of RAM. As good at it is, and yes, it was and is good in the grand scheme; I'm disappointed that Java still has so much inertia, and that development and adoption of alternatives is so slow going. I feel as if there is a "it's good enough, why change anything" attitude that stems from lack of understanding that there are still big juicy low hanging fruit to be found and incorporated into our tools, to ultimately make software better AND easier to write/maintain. The line about "lots of smart people have been optimizing the JVM for a long time" seems like a go-to defense of what I see as stagnation.