Backend is worse, they’ll make you use the Spring “framework” that makes React look like a dream.
We have a basic template that when empty, takes about 20min to compile on a very new laptop, builds to a 200MB+ jar.
Something sounds wrong, but I don't know exactly what you mean by "basic template"? Like a Spring boot example app?
A couple annotations and a base application class and you're up and running with a REST service. That's considered hard?
Translated to React: a single render function and you're up and running with a webpage. That's considered hard?
Spring is a simple MVC framework, it follows the same patterns as similar Ruby, Python, C#, PHP etc frameworks. React very much blazes its own complicated trail.
That statement is beyond the absurd. The API of React is several orders of magnitude smaller than Spring and similar MVC frameworks with the same feature. There is even a React replacement with feature parity, Preact, that clocks around 3kb.
Spring is a powerful but pretty complicated DI framework. That MVC stuff is also there but for many use cases (microservices, batch, CLI) it’s not really helpful.
Well, nowadays anyway. It's come a long way from the point where an AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean seemed like a viable solution to a problem in the framework.