No, it's likely that it won't be quite as disruptive in the future. There were a few backward incompatible changes with modularisation (in order to break module

No, it's likely that it won't be quite as disruptive in the future. There were a few backward incompatible changes with modularisation (in order to break module cycles) but the bigger disruptive changes were moves away from sun.misc.* packages which should never have been used by production code (but which often were, because speed). Fortunately Java took a middle-of-the-road approach; it didn't quite get rid of as many things as it could (Unsafe stayed around in a few ways). Had it all been killed off then the transition would have been more problematic. With Java 17 being the next LTS I don't think there's appetite to break things before then but it's quite possible that Java 18 will really put the hammer down and remove Unsafe for good. That, I think, will be one of the last disruptive things Java does.