You’re only counting JEPs, which are only for more involved features. There are lots of changes to the JDK apis that are used by other runtimes. See, for instance: https://javaalmanac.io/jdk/27/apidiff/26/.
Admittedly, the terminology here is almost designed to be maximally confusing, and I’ve never read a good post that laid out how everything relates.
There are also bug-fixes and performance improvements that are not going to show on the page I linked.
I do think it’s plausible this is a smaller release. Not that this was the real point of the discussion, but I think it’s still just a good idea to have more than one release a year. It keeps things moving smoothly, and lowers the cost of missing a release, which has beneficial effects.
I started programming when Java 6 was relatively new. Back then it was about 3-4 years in between releases. Although I don’t write much Java any more, I’m happy to see changes shipping more frequently now.
Admittedly, the terminology here is almost designed to be maximally confusing, and I’ve never read a good post that laid out how everything relates.