At least in C# you can ignore most of it and the complexity doesn't really come from numerous foot guns. You can still write Java 1.6/.NET 2 style C# code just

At least in C# you can ignore most of it and the complexity doesn't really come from numerous foot guns. You can still write Java 1.6/.NET 2 style C# code just fine, it's all there. The rest of the features can be fully ignored and they won't hurt you. But then again the newer features they do make writing code a lot nicer, giving more compile time analysis warnings etc hopefully resulting in slightly better code. And the new features also enabled a lot of performance improvements in the runtime which is nice. .NET 2/4 wasn't all that fast, .NET 8 can be a lot faster.