The original goal of EJB's was to push functional decomposition out onto the network.

Entity beans were always a disaster, and Stateful Session Beans had scaling problems, but Stateless Session beans by the time of EJB3 were an easy way to push logic out to the network while getting a whole bunch of stuff (pooling, scaling, failover, transaction management, security, etc) for free.

These days they'd be calling them micro services.

The main problem was combining everything into the big ball of mud that is J2EE. If they had let each component live and die on its own merits I think the ecosystem would be in a much better state today.

I laughed harder than I should've because I just moments ago was reviewing a stack trace with a teammate and questioned "have you ever gotten anything useful after line 50 of a Spring stack trace?"

And then we all laughed until we realized half the trace was because it got logged and thrown and then logged again...