Answer 1

Pretty good, really. It has certainly declined in popularity, but at one point it had a near dominant presence in the area. The advantage with Java is that is has been around for ages and there are lots of external libraries designed for Java that make most things possible and fairly easy to implement. Functional languages are gaining ground, which was part of the motivation for adding lambdas and streams in Java 8, as it allows much more efficient code in some situation, particularly with the Collections API that badly needed some love.

In the professional world, most developers know multiple languages and Java is definitely a good one to have, and is great for it's OOP nature. Languages like Scala and Kotlin work off of the JVM too, and you can usually use the two languages together if you wanted (like in Android, if you don't know how to do it in Kotlin, just do it in Java and they play nicely together).

So yeah, Java has evolved in recent years keeping it relevant as new demands are arising, but having been around a bit longer means there are loads of resources around (both for developing and learning)