It is. If your media diet consists of HN and reddit you'd think people actually use Rust, but judging by who's hiring for what according to Indeed, Java is 3rd after Python and JavaScript, and Rust doesn't even rank.

Yes, it's extremely popular. No matter how you count it's at least in the top 10 programming languages for new code being written. And there are several other niche languages that also target the JVM.