I actually think the Java ecosystem is part of why people dislike it. Java seems to attract a lot of extremely heavyweight frameworks (like Spring) that are too complex to fully understand and too heavyweight to make sense for most projects.
So use helidon, micronaut, javalin, or spark if you want something small, but I suspect in any real application you’ll just end up recreating half of spring. That’s what my company did and it’s not near the quality of anything in Spring.
