I never understood the fight against ORMs. In the end you'll simply be writing your own framework
Just a lot of boilerplate code, but the overal architecture and structure of JEE is still very sound
What did you like about JEE? I worked in that world for years and don't miss it in the least.
I dunno it just worked for me. But I kept using the standards, no vendor lockin stuff, which bea etc always wanted.
I think the servlet design is great, the whole packaging/deployment model is great. And then well the session beans were overkill in general, so they were swapped out quite early by me. Swapped jsp out for I think velocity templates. And that application is still alive, running, and on the same platform.
And Java meant, at least for me and how I configured it, proper debugging and IDE support (love Eclipse), hot code reload, easy releases, repeatability, ci/cd. The last 20 years, no __significant__ improvements in my opinion.