> Nowadays you basically don't code Java, you code Spring Boot. And that has all the bad things you think when people say "Java".

Subjective experience, but largely agreed.

Vague rant that summarizes my own experience: major version updates kind of suck, even if Spring Boot is still better than regular Spring (I've gone through the XML hell, was not fun, even less so with a separate Tomcat instance that we had to deploy to, instead of an embedded one). In practice their huge effective pom.xml also leads to conflicts when your package needs something else and it feels a bit arcane to override things. There are things that have underlying technical reasons for being the way they are but seem stupid from afar - like how @Transactional doesn't work when called from within the same bean. Personally I also prefer code over convention for configuration and initialization so the whole annotation driven setup feels quite annoying and difficult to debug when things go wrong - but even the code configuration isn't always great and sometimes it feels like they have abstractions for the sake of abstractions. Spring Boot also often brings friends like MapStruct or Lombok or Mockito which add even more dynamic behavior and issues when you update JDK, alongside slow testing with JUnit and unpleasant debugging of jumping through numerous abstraction layers. You don't strictly have to, but people will.

I probably should have written down every complaint with exact details (so those could be picked apart as user error) over the years that I've been unfortunately maintaining and building shitty software with Java, but I will say this - modern Spring Boot isn't wholly horrible, it has a pretty rich ecosystem and you can do a lot of things with it, but the overall vibe I get from it ofen can be summarized with "Eww." I'd end up using it because I have to, or because it's a means to an end ("Hey, we need to build an event-driven system to integrate with a bunch of others, you have two weeks"), not because I want to.

For the sake of comparison, I believe that for plenty of the folks even Dropwizard would be worth a look: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/ it is more or less like some glue around a bunch of idiomatic packages in the Java ecosystem and it's not horribly hard to integrate something that you want yourself (e.g. Dagger 2 for DI, at this point I'll take anything that does as much as possible at compile time https://dagger.dev/dev-guide/).

Or, for a more modern spin, Quarkus isn't too bad either https://quarkus.io/ or maybe Micronaut https://micronaut.io/ or perhaps Helidon https://helidon.io/ with neither of those being strong recommendations - figure out what you like for yourselves. For people that have been luckier than me, that might as well be the very same Spring Boot, just on better projects. JVM is a pretty cool piece of tech though, and so are the JetBrains IDEs with their refactoring features and nice Maven integration.