My experience is that it's not only the usage of annotations, but the way Spring handles/implements those annotations which is confusing. As an example, Micron

My experience is that it's not only the usage of annotations, but the way Spring handles/implements those annotations which is confusing. As an example, Micronaut[1] also uses annotations a lot, but their implementation is a lot easier to reason about, because there is less indirection with proxy objects and other weird stuff that Spring uses. Micronaut does not implement nearly as many annotations as Spring though, which basically means less functionality pre-built. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, but it could be. [1] https://micronaut.io/ https://micronaut.io/