You keep claiming that the language team's knowledge of a feature drives that feature's adoption.
That's not accurate.
Popularity of a feature and enterprise demand drive it's adoption.
It doesn't really matter what the language team knows, it matters what the average developer knows since their collective wants are in large part what drives the language team.
There are hundreds of thousands of Java devs who only ever wrote Java and suddenly had to write Kotlin, and are now clambering for these feature improvements in Java.