What you forget is: You get so many features with Spring Boot and you can actually use them without increasing the memory footprint.

Yes of course, for a single service with one endpoint that does nothing it is bloat. But which microservice does nothing?

Think about a database backend, actuator endpoints, etc. They are all possible with a memory footprint of ~200mb. It can be less is you use another language, but I doubt that Go will give you such a major framework for developing a microservice. And this will save you a lot more time than taking an hour to reduce your memory footprint.

And one thing you missed too: Using the JVM should also be combined with a basic knowledge about how the heap works. And if you do not limit it, it will get a lot bigger than required, this should be common knowledge. Comparing this to Go it seems like a much better way. In Go there is afaik no way to limit the heap. In worst case it will grow and grow and grow.