Not a Java dev here, at least in part because the amount of ceremony to do trivial things seems excessive.

My understanding is that the ceremony and redundancy is deliberate. You type the same meaning multiple times so the compiler can detect inconsistencies and tell you about them. I.e. it's a feature, not a bug. Slightly analogous to type annotations or unit tests, one wants to write the redundant information in exchange for compiler diagnostics.

Syntactic sugar to make the language less annoying to work in is opposed to that goal, hard to guess if that's better for the target market.