"Oh look, I need to upgrade mockito and Spring. Oh, now I upgraded Spring I need to update the spring JPA plugin. Oh now I upgraded that I need to upgrade Hibernate. Oh now I need to upgrade the library built on it that that team over there maintains. Oh, they're not interested." etc. etc.
When using Spring Boot you usually update just one version and everything else is updated via BOM. There should be a really good reason to have fine-grained control over every single dependency.
So honestly I didn't realise that it's POM extended to ecosystem libraries beyond Spring's own. However, it still doesn't solve the problem that e.g. the hibernate version compatible with Spring Framework n+1 is not compatible with the hibernate version compatible with Spring Framework n and now you're doing an "all or nothing" upgrade, which for a large app can be time consuming.
True, Spring upgrades can be a pain in the ass. There is a trick to make it less painful though. Use maven BOM for version management. As with any framework upgrade, it doesn't make the process entirely painless. But very much less painful.
