I am a C# developer thrown into the deep end of Java I guess :)

So all I've been able to do is compile the project using a mvn command, and use VS Code or Notepad to spot edit code and hope for the best. I've wanted interactive debugging for awhile but nothing seems to work right. We use RAD for all the other projects here but the use of AspectJ by contractors has caused us some issues. Anything beyond Eclipse Photon has no marketplace plugin that works, and in any case it seems to crash in both RAD and Eclipse trying to attach a debugger. We are using WebSphere 8.5, where an EAR package has to be compiled and uploaded to that for services to run.

The State is broke and so we're not getting IntelliJ or any paid product this year. I just want an IDE that can compile correctly and debug. I'm not familiar with the intricacies of mvn or yarn (they have an Angular front end), but I've been able to compile everything at least to try to run it locally. The use of some kind of "facade" pattern obscures most of the database operations and I think they leverage Spring to auto-generate these (which makes it actually harder not easier to figure it out for maintenance since there are 3-4 layers of source files that just pass on data to the next, ending up with a dozen files open to find the damn REAL db operation / SQL that runs).

Any tools I can use to make sense of this contractor-produced nightmare of code?