There are certainly some Java details assessed, and arguably more than there should be, but the exam does assess the ability to use variables and write expressions; to write loops, including nested loops; to write conditional statements, including nested and complex conditionals; to write methods that call other methods; to organise data and behaviour using instance variables, methods, and inheritance; to store and process sequential and two-dimensional data; and questions in the corresponding multiple-choice section are likely to briefly address sorting, and recursion, though those topics are not assessed in the FRQs.

I.e. introductory programming. There's nothing in the list I wrote above that is specific to Java (and if you swap out "methods" for "functions" it could be any number of different languages). It seems boring and basic to you because it is literally just the very beginning of a CS curriculum. If you're only seeing the FRQs, which test code implementation, you should also know that in the multiple-choice section there are also problems requiring students to trace code, identify useful test cases, contrast similar code segments, and describe code behaviour—all of which are pointing to deeper computer science ideas—as well as figure out how many times a particular piece of code runs for a particular input, which is a precursor to Big-O analysis.