I've always wondered, if it's also just less pain when you write plain/idiomatic Java.

I write mostly functional Scala with lots of message passing and such, so data types often move through interfaces where their type may be lost and then we do lots of pattern matching, where missing runtime types come up on quite a regular basis.

I'd say probably once a week, I have to write or come by an ugly portion of code where we had to manually pass around type information and do explicit casts to make it all fit together.