In my experience, almost all of those "must have X years of experience with Y" requirements are written up by HR people who are loosely interpreting poorly unde

In my experience, almost all of those "must have X years of experience with Y" requirements are written up by HR people who are loosely interpreting poorly understood requirements told to them by either the hiring manager, or other HR people. In many or most cases, the people writing up those job postings are not the same people who would be interviewing or hiring you, and they're more aspirational requirements than anything else. They hope that someone with X years of experience with Spring will magically come out of the woodwork and send them a resume, but they're just as likely to hire a fresh grad who doesn't know anything about Spring other than what they skimmed on Wikipedia right before going to the interview. And the people doing the interviewing and hiring might actually be fine with that. Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.