Yes, but it's also a new feature (along with dozens of others). The complaint I answered was that Java is stagnant somehow, when it has been evolving fast in the last 5 years, and is accelerating its pace (release cadenze) even more.

>Kotlin, on the other hand, recently added actual unsigned types[0] – taking up the same number of bits as the corresponding signed type, supporting the normal mathematical operators, and preventing unintended mixups with signed types.

Which, given that the JVM doesn't support them at the bytecode level (iirc), they also use some similar trick of working with signed numbers under the hood, just hide it better at the syntax level.