The way I remember it is if you were single-stack from client to server, yeah, EJBs and others in the J2EE worked pretty well. On the other hand, if you wanted

The way I remember it is if you were single-stack from client to server, yeah, EJBs and others in the J2EE worked pretty well. On the other hand, if you wanted to get of the rails and have clients in multiple stacks and clients who talked to different stacks, then it just all fell apart. Even multiple vendors in the J2EE space could be a problem. Being able to do things simply hid a lot of complexity. It was hard to investigate that complexity when things went wrong. It feels like chaos today, with myriad front-end frameworks and best practices changing every three months, but I would take this over mid-2000's Java tech because it just simply seems like less magic. I can break out Postman and just see what's going on. I agree that there's no golden bullet, and that there's no end of crappy REST definitions. Furthermore, it's mostly not even REST, not in a HATEOAS kind of way. But that's ok, I still feel more productive than I did 15 years ago, and I wouldn't want to go back.