I don't think it is about doing it "correctly". I don't think there is a "correct". There's stuff that works and then there's stuff that is a waste of time. For many years, most Java practitioners wasted time doing things that don't actually work.
It is about finding a practice that works better than the other ways that you have been exposed to and then try to figure out if you can write it down and explain it in a way that makes other people more productive and more capable of producing quality. Of course, that requires you to be exposed to a lot of practices and having the ability to figure out if they work. Not all programmers have that ability.
Some people find plateaus that are better than other plateaus. If you teach other people what you do then sometimes people think of that as the way to do it until someone else improves on it. Or someone finds an entirely new direction to go in that is perhaps even better.
> Do you have reason to believe you won’t be looking back in 10 years’ time, realising you’ve been doing it wrong in 2024 still?
A lot of the thinking that went into how we did Java evolved slowly over a couple of decades and we eventually started seeing people come around to our point of view. We just started a bit earlier than most. And it wasn't just informed by how we did Java. A lot of ideas came from how we did things in other languages as well.
Things like avoiding large frameworks that lock you in and dictate design choices, embedding servers rather than loading the application into the server (which never actually worked), or even making self-contained applications that have no external dependencies, were, to varying degrees, controversial at different points in history. Even the idea of treating servers like cattle rather than pets was controversial at some point.
Some of the things we spent a lot of time thinking about I don't see wide spread awareness of. Like designing for evolvability which is very, very different from over-engineering. Those bits are still hard to explain - and especially when people have short attention spans. But they are just as important today as they were 15 years ago. (I'm still terrible at explaining how we design for evolvability)
(I stopped doing Java around 2016. But most of the practices we developed live on in how we do Go. I think the reason switching to Go was so easy and happened so fast was that Go was very compatible with what we tried to do in Java)