I'd still say that even today Java desktop apps are much slower, laggier and generally still look worse than their native counterparts. It's just that, yes, hardware is so much better which sort of hides most of the Java problems.
Uglier is relative, but I will give you that neither unthemed Swing or JavaFX are too fine looking.
But I would say that e.g. IntelliJ looks quite good and that is a basic theme available without much tweaking, plus it can be very snappy (when jetbrains doesn’t ship it with a decade old JVM with shitty default settings. It is fixed in recent versions).
But that was 20-30 years ago, literally. A few things happened: SSDs, and Java startup time.
A warm-start Java "Hello World" is 200-300ms. A babashka (bb) "Hello World" is 30-40ms, which is faster than Python3 "Hello World" (40-50ms).