Despite the all-in opinion in this particular thread, my take is a little more nuanced. The modern versions of Spring are a breath of fresh air (no pun) compare

Despite the all-in opinion in this particular thread, my take is a little more nuanced. The modern versions of Spring are a breath of fresh air (no pun) compared to the older ones. It still does have a bit of a kitchen sink feel when you build something non-trivial, and some of the magic of the boot approach can become hard to reason about. You may prefer a simpler worldview of an alternative runtime, and you can also benefit from shorter compiles/quicker startup, etc. That said, the downsides aren't really that bad. It's got a strong community, will obviously still be around in 5 years, and the JVM is seeing strong investment and modernization. All in all, it'd be a strong contender if I was putting my money on the line. I'm still a fan of the simplest-thing-that-can-work approach (in the old days it was Jetty + Guice + whatever else you wanted), but modern Spring isn't all that far off from the experience anymore.