Kotlin embraced the same thing via co-routines, which are conceptually similar to go routines. It adds a few useful concepts around this though; mainly that of a co-routine context which encapsulates that a tree of co-routine calls needs some notion of failure handling and cancellation. Additionally, co-routines are dispatched to a dispatcher. A dispatcher can be just on the same thread or actually use a thread pool. Or as of recent Java versions a virtual thread pool. There's actually very little point in using virtual threads in Kotlin. They are basically a slightly more heavy weight way of doing co-routines. The main benefit is dealing with legacy blocking Java libraries.
But the bottom line with virtual threads, go-routines, or kotlin's co-routines is that it indeed allows for imperative code style code that is easy to read and understand. Of course you still need to understand all the pitfalls of concurrency bugs and all the weird and wonderful way things can fail to work as you expect. And while Java's virtual threads are designed to work like magic pixie dust, it does have some nasty failure modes where a single virtual thread can end up blocking all your virtual threads. Having a lot of synchronized blocks in legacy code could cause that.
Kotlin is not a language I learned so I will avoid commenting.
However, the use of JAVA for me is for admin backend or heavy weight services for enterprises or startups I coded for, so for my taste I can't use it without spring or jboss, etc.. , and in that way I think simplicity went out the window a long long time ago :) It took me years to learn all the quirks of these frameworks... and the worse thing about it is that they keep changing every few months...
Kotlin makes a lot of that stuff easier to deal with and there is also a growing number of things that work without Java libraries. Or even the JVM. I use it with Spring Boot. But we also have a lot of kotlin-js code running in a browser. And I use quite a few multiplatform libraries for Kotlin that work pretty much anywhere. I've even written a few myself. It's pretty easy to write portable code in Kotlin these days.
For example ktor works on the JVM but you can also build native applications with it. And I use ktor client in the browser. When running in the browser it uses the browser fetch API. When running on the jvm you can configure it to use any of a wide range of Java http clients. On native it uses curl.
But the bottom line with virtual threads, go-routines, or kotlin's co-routines is that it indeed allows for imperative code style code that is easy to read and understand. Of course you still need to understand all the pitfalls of concurrency bugs and all the weird and wonderful way things can fail to work as you expect. And while Java's virtual threads are designed to work like magic pixie dust, it does have some nasty failure modes where a single virtual thread can end up blocking all your virtual threads. Having a lot of synchronized blocks in legacy code could cause that.