Still is, quite a few features like Swing editors, or the two way editing between rendering templates and Java code, or the quality of profiling tools for such open source product.
I also used NetBeans a bit years ago, though that was mainly because it had a (mostly) WYSIWYG editor compared to Eclipse (technically Eclipse had a plugin for that which supposedly was also superior in how it worked - it parsed the code to figure out what the GUI would look like and updated in place instead of NetBeans' generating code with commented out sections you wasn't supposed to touch - but in practice it was both slow and clunky).
For Java specifically i felt NetBeans was faster and simpler though i bounced between it and Eclipse because i also used Eclipse for other stuff (C++ mainly) so unless i wanted a GUI i used Eclipse. I did stopped writing Java some time ago though.
I did try a recent NetBeans build but i found it much less polished than what i remember from before it became "Apache NetBeans".
I’ve gotten back up to speed via IntelliJ but it still doesn’t feel as effortless as it did in Netbeans. And way less care and feeding than Eclipse.
Sorry, there’s a lot of “feels” in this post but for me, Netbeans was the one Java IDE that I didn’t have to fight with.