I have to agree with the OP. We'll be living with big bloated Java systems well into the afterlife, just like we're living with the big bloated COBOL systems of yesteryears. Why? They're the same sort of systems.

Big 'enterprise' in-house systems which keep the business running. The COBOL ones which got re-written in the later 90s got rewritten to what -- Java. And they're not going to do that again for a good long time.

So, we've traded COBOL/VSAM for Java/EJB (shudder) or JDBC. Traded the expensive as hell VM system for an expensive as hell J2EE container. Or maybe JBoss.

And the folks getting rich doing the maintenance in 15 years will be the 'old timers' which still know Java / J2EE . And I pity them and their deployment descriptors.