Looks like I came up the same path as you: XML in Spring 2, with Spring 3 adding lots of support for annotations. Once Spring 4 came around, I was... okay with

Looks like I came up the same path as you: XML in Spring 2, with Spring 3 adding lots of support for annotations. Once Spring 4 came around, I was... okay with abandoning _most_ XML, but some things just made way more sense in XML, such as Spring Security configuration. I first saw Spring Boot demoed by Josh Long at a Pivotal office in Toronto, and my first reaction was to wretch at autoconfiguration, since it was extremely apparent where it would lead. The team I was working with at the time were a hard NO on annotation-driven config, which I thought was extreme at the time; however, several jobs later, I saw the proliferation of Boot and the autoconfiguration cancer it caused. Some projects were explicitly re-written with a hard technical requirement to not use Spring Boot, and those code bases ended up cleaner and more readable as a result. The current gig is steeped in Boot and I've just given up and instead tried to use TypeScript for anything new, simply to avoid the Spring ecosystem. What's more terrifying is watching new grads and green developers use this magic trash and have zero concept of what's actually happening under the covers. When I say zero concept, I really do mean that they have no idea what the servlet spec is, let alone containers or reverse-proxies.