To address your last point I think that style of Java has fallen out of favour in recent years. It's still around, there is a lot of existing J2EE codebases bu

To address your last point I think that style of Java has fallen out of favour in recent years. It's still around, there is a lot of existing J2EE codebases but it's successor - Quarkus has done away with the vast majority of the config mess. I can't speak to how well it manages that transition though as I was never a big J2EE guy. The other old offender, Spring, developed a new convention over configuration distribution called Spring Boot which requires minimal configuration and has pretty much displaced the old way of doing things entirely. It's been around for years as the default option at this point. The way I see Java is that it moves slowly but tends to happily assimilate the best ideas from other languages, runtimes and frameworks and over time sheds it's warts (Java 8 era sun.internal.*, old Date/Time APIs, etc). Not everyone seems to have an up to date opinion of Java because the last time they touched it was J2EE days or worse yet in university.