Nine years is a long time, but honestly it tracks with how deeply broken Date has been since Brendan Eich cargo-culted java.util.Date in 1995. The real win with Temporal isn't just immutability or timezone support — it's that PlainDate and ZonedDateTime finally give us types that match how humans actually think about time. I've lost count of how many bugs I've shipped because Date silently coerces everything to UTC instants when half the time what you actually have is a "wall clock" value with no timezone attached.