I used to be opposed to all the "magic"... but after you write a few MVC projects with Hibernate backends, etc... why keep having to do that all from scratch each time?

You end up making your own framework that has all that in it, so that you just change a few things here and there and can start getting to the business logic that much quicker.

Then you realize you're maintaining all of that code... when you'd much rather maintain the business logic bits...

Which leads to using Spring Boot and letting them maintain everything else.