Nah Java didn’t bring Sun down...
They stayed on proprietary hardware that priced them out of the market as cheaper and cheaper hardware was available and performed well enough.
Agree. Sun with SPARC and HP with PA-RISC were great "big endian" proprietary hardware. The "little endian" world built on the X86 architectures became cheap and easy. Making code run well on long endian architectures is time consuming. Getting Linux up on X86 was really the death knell for the proprietary UNIX on (SPARC/PA-RISC). Incorporation of the floating point processor in the X86 CPU was a necessary step to make it a practical replacement.