You're forgetting legacy and history. Many Java programmers came to Java, myself included, from C (or C++). The == operator in C is a simple register comparison. If you compare two ints the the == operator will return true iff the two int values are the same, but if you compare two int pointers, then equal integer values may or may not be stored at the same address, which is exactly what we're seeing here. Since Java references are pointers, this behavior -- while probably not the right choice -- was less surprising to us, C programmers, than the alternative. Of course, auto-boxing made this behavior even stranger, but autoboxing was added to the language much later.

Python has exactly the same behavior if you compare integers using the is operator. Two int-variables with same value are only "is-equal" up until somewhere around 100000 also. Many beginners do this mistake as they think you should always use is in python and don't even know that == also exist.