The Java space though unloved but the younger crowd is still super strong and Spring Boot gives all those competing platforms a run for their money leveraging the enormous JVM ecosystem. Java may not be the most concise of languages but I think many people would be surprised by how little boilerplate there is in modern Java and Spring.
Spring is pretty lean as long as your use case is typical and common - you can practically setup most of the foundation just via config. However, anytime you have to deviate from the typical, the complexity of the Spring framework underneath starts to show and the beans and boilerplate start to grow pretty fast - not unmanageable but not exactly lean either. Fully agree about the ecosystem.
At the same time, this flexibility is a core feature of Spring. In most other frameworks, when you have a use case that isn't supported, you're entirely on your own. Or, worse, end up with in-house patches and hacks to the framework itself. Spring is an integration framework, and so closer to a framework for building frameworks. It just so happens to have a bunch of well supported ecosystem defaults.
