> Most organizations that use Java tend to be pretty conservative with their technology picks

That part i s true.

> with newer Java versions the only real gap with Kotlin is null-safety

But that part isn't. Kotlin has:

- Structured Concurrency: Coming to Java sometime in the future, but it's been in preview for very long now.

- Standalone functions that don't have to live in classes

- Properties

- Property delegation

- Data classes: more powerful than records. Can be used for large DTOs that you can modify with copy(). Java needs something like Lombok to make records more useful.

- Extension methods

- Context parameters

- Operator overloading

- Implementation delegation

- Inline functions (which can receive returning closures and reified types)

- Block syntax (supports `it` for unnamed arguments)

- Sequence abstractions: more powerful and more efficient than Java streams due to the inlining and block syntax.

This is just a partial list, but Kotlin clearly has a lot of things that Java doesn't. If you only personally care about NPEs that's fine, but that's not the only thing.