Is it? I come from a very different background and I'm trying to get a small Java back-end up and running (Quarkus) and wow, it's so painful! There's a huge amount of buy in, to me, in the framework. I found Node, Go and Python to be easier in simply delivering a HTTP(S) server. I've gotta do it in Java for reasons.
const app = express()
app.get("/user", (id) => { return db.user(id); })
app.run() or something like that.
Spring is just a few annotations away from creating an endpoint.
Of course with spring, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t java that you have to know.
However, the Spring framework in the 2000s was a horrible mess of "aspect oriented programming" and obscure XML configuration files. Till this day I had no idea what it was trying to achieve with that architecture (except maybe trying to avoid writing code by writing lots of XML configuration files instead)
I think they learned their lesson.