No, Java generics are basically syntactic sugar over casts, which is why types are erased at runtime when you're trying to debug. Performance also isn't as good as for C# generics since the Java approach limits optimizations.
As someone who works with Java all the time I'm the first to admit that something like TypeToken in GSON or comparable things in other libraries is not the greatest of things. I've also more than once wished I could to if(xy instanceof List<Something>), which you cannot do in Java. Can you work around it? Sure. Do I understand why Java has it? Yes. But "minor" .. no, it's not so minor in my experience.
