Hmm actually it's very intuitive with latest versions.
Maybe you're stuck on the old ones where they used to use XML still lol
The old Spring, not so much - I've never had a bare Spring project that was pleasant to work with, especially when you don't have embedded Tomcat and the application server is configured separately from the deployable .war or whatever, what a mess. Thankfully, you can put those legacy projects into containers and make things slightly more palatable.
That said, even Spring Boot can feel a bit much sometimes, something like Dropwizard is still very idiomatic as far as the Java ecosystem is concerned and is both stable and usable in those cases: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/ (not as fancy as Vert.X or Quarkus or whatever, but it's been around for a while and is decently documented)
Maybe it’s because my programming days date back to the era of 7-bit ASCII and every language implementation was a little different from the others in what aspects and extensions of the language it provided, but I find Java/Spring a pretty comfortable place to work (which is not to say that I eschew other languages). In general, I find that most of the time when developers express hate for a language or platform it really boils down to: “this isn’t what I’m used to and I don‘t want to change.”