Consider that people to this day still dog Java for being overly verbose, and then consider how much boilerplate (code and XML) is required to make something like a Spring REST controller that includes dependency injection. You can boil that down to basically one small class with a couple of annotations these days. The old way is absolutely dreadful in comparison.

Java was already that. The grandparent is just noting what was there before annotations arrived.

Well they're actually being kind, XML was a step up from having the annotations in docstrings. That was infuriatingly bad.