Bad decisions can be made using any technology. Java has a lot of crufty legacy APIs because, well it has a legacy. I gave up using JSPs years ago for Freemar

Bad decisions can be made using any technology. Java has a lot of crufty legacy APIs because, well it has a legacy. I gave up using JSPs years ago for Freemarker. I now use Vert.x rather than servlet contains which gives me a node.js environment but with access to the Java ecosystems and basic things like mature logging frameworks, as well as more advanced features (oh and multithreading in a single process). Despite Spring being Enterprise it still scales down to simpler apps pretty well due to its modularity. These can be build into a single jar app that is easy to build and deploy, and combined with a database migration library, maintain their own database schemas. Very, very usable. Yes, I probably would not use Java on the frontend unless it was for a technical audience.