Spring Boot isn‘t bad. It‘s opinionated about configurations and dependencies. Its main advantage is that you can start shipping production-quality code very quickly, focusing on business problems rather than anything else. Vibe coding on it is more or less stable, entire apps can be built solo in a few months. And it‘s easy to do fullstack with SSR based on Thymeleaf and Htmx. It is absolutely superior to anything that exists for node stack.

And then there‘s also Micronaut, if you prefer compile-time setup to Spring.