Meh.. in my opinion a lot of this is just tropes. Spring is a fine environment to work in, although you really don't have to use any XML with modern Spring. But you can if you prefer to for some reason.

All the annotation driven "black magic" can be mildly annoying at times, especially before you understand what's going on under the hood... but considering the amount of boiler-plate crap it saves you from dealing with, I'll happily accept that tradeoff.

For my money, if I was starting a new backend service today, I'd absolutely reach for Spring Boot as my starting point. Of course, I may be biased given that I've been writing Java code for 20 years, and I remember what a breath of fresh air Spring was compared to the old EJB 2.x era "J2EE" stuff.

could have had worse you started just around the xdoclet, that was peak madness