All of this is long before Spring Boot. Embedding the web server so that your system is just a plain Java application is a great idea; annotation based config is a great idea; both of those are things you could do (and I did do) back in 2010 on Spring 3.3.
The stuff that Spring Boot adds - the spooky-action-at-a-distance classpath scanning, the we-can-use-them-but-you-can't annotations, the way you can't override part of an autoconfig but have to either accept what the library gives you or write a full config from scratch - is a big mistake. Those who forget Java EE are doomed to repeat it I guess.
> Also, Spring would be a miserable experience if it were not for Maven/Gradle.
Sure. "Have dependency management that doesn't suck" is good advice for any software ecosystem.
Also, Spring would be a miserable experience if it were not for Maven/Gradle. Have you ever counted the jar files included in a typical SpringBoot+Thymeleaf+Spring-Data app?