If that wasn't the case, Google would support Java latest with all features, alongside Kotlin, and let the best win.
See how much market update Kotlin has outside Android, when it isn't being pushed and needs to compete against Java vLatest on equal terms.
Android is Google's J++, which Sun sued and won.
Kotlin is Google's C#.
Plus everyone keeps forgetting Kotlin is a JVM based language, Android Studio and Gradle are implemented in JVM languages, JVM are implemented in a mix of C, C++ and Java (zero Kotlin), Android still uses Java, only that Google only takes out of OpenJDK what they feel like, and currentl that is Java 17 LTS, most of the work on OpenJDK was done by Oracle employees.
I think it will be very hard for us to find anything in common to agree on then.
Anyway, it’s pretty clear Google is pushing Kotlin because they don’t want to have anything to do with Oracle which has not been cleared by the verdict of their last trial. The situation has nothing to do with anything technical.
Blaming them for pushing Kotlin when the alternative you offer is them using a language they have already been sued for their use of seems extremely misguided to me.
I call them dishonest by comparing outdated Java 7 subset with Kotlin, when back in 2017 the latest version was Java 9, and in 2025 it is Java 24, and yet the documentation keeps using Java 8 for most examples on Java versus Kotlin.
How come Google doesn't want to have anything with Oracle, when it is impossible to build an Android distribution without a JVM, again people like yourself keep forgeting OpenJDK is mostly a product from Oracle employees (about 80%) with remaing efforts distributed across Red-Hat(IBM), IBM, Azul, Microsoft and JetBrains (I wonder what those do on Android), Kotlin doesn't build for Android without a JVM implementation, Gradle requires a JVM implementation, Android Studio requires a JVM implementation, Maven Central has JVM libraries,....
If Google doesn't want anything to do with Oracle why aren't they using Dart, created by themselves, instead of a language that is fully dependent on Oracle's kigdom for its own very existence?
Kotlin has a very similar syntax to Groovy, which already had that feature (it looks identical in Groovy and Kotlin)... and I believe Groovy itself took that from Ruby, I believe (Groovy tried to add most convenient features from Python and Ruby). Perhaps that is what came from OCaml?? No idea, but I'd say the chance Kotlin copied Groovy is much higher as JB was using Java and Groovy before Kotlin existed.
I definitely find it (and jetpack compose) make developing android apps a much better experience than it used to be.
What I like a lot about Kotlin are its well written documentation and the trailing lambdas feature. That is definitely directly OCaml inspired (though I also recently saw it in a newer language, the "use" feature in Gleam). But in Kotlin it looks nicer imo. Allows declarative code to look pretty much like json which makes it more beginner friendly than the use syntax.
But Kotlin doesn't really significantly stand out among Java, C#, Swift, Go, etc. And so it is kind of doomed to be a somewhat domain specific language imo.