It's perfectly fine to never have touched Spring. What surprised me is not acknowledging that not only are annotations used to do clerical things like @Override or @Deprecated, and not only to do some weird wiring with @Injected or @RequestBody, but allow to add large custom steps in transforming the code. Annotation processors are a huge comptime interface that can do, and routinely does, wild things, unimaginable in Go, the kind of code transformations you would expect in Lisp or Python.
I suspect the latter should have interesting security implications, too.
All the big magic annotations are for Enterprise.
Okay, I've occasionally done a couple spring boot rest, which was ... Fine ... As long as you didn't have to do anything even remotely and complicated, but it keeps you in this weird box of middle performance.
If you've ever been on any large Enterprise spring Java project, you know what the future of vibe coded enterprise is bringing.
Anyway, I just wanted to say, that it's totally pointless to state something like "I know it well"... Say what's your problem with it, "I don't like it" doesn't add anything to the conversation. I'm quite sure whatever you would say as problems, most people would agree, maybe there would be even tips under it how to prevent it. That will never happen with the kind of comments which you made above.