Encouraging new programmers to learn Java isn't cruel? "Son, today is the first day of a long journey into enterprise software development. Yay"

It is cruel, and something Universities have been doing forever.

You prefer customizing wordpress?

I'm still seeing shared hosts offer PHP everywhere at very cheap prices.

That's not true for Java or C#.

Java and C# are not website-first languages and have never been popular on webhosts. They're still very widely used, maybe even growing; certainly I'd bet that both have a better growth rate than PHP at the moment.