“Bad” is a value judgement. I’d go more with “taking on problems we don’t have” - J2EE made more sense if you were in a business like Atlassian’s where you sell an app to customers who wants to be able to run in it a bunch of different ways and configure many things without access to the source code. That especially made sense in the older era where apps were managed by sysadmins who didn’t have compilers and wouldn’t have gotten the source code from a vendor or wanted to pull it out of CVS.

That’s legitimate but, especially for open source developers, overkill and it pulls in a ton of maintenance work (e.g. I have several apps with a ton of CVEs in components which were never used but can’t be removed without breaking things, and thousands of lines of XML configuration which has to be analyzed to look for intentional customization to upgrade to the release version which has been patched. Now, maybe that’s doing it wrong but that’s multiple separate Java specialist development shops so it’s not just me being dense.).