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There's always https://javalin.io/

Plain servlets, jetty, haproxy for TLS, jstl, postgres, apache dbcp. Add in whatever specialty libraries for the project and you can pull away with 1/100th of the dependencies.

I built a blog engine that almost has that stack (Payara instead of jetty, apache dbcp).

Agreed, though I’d also add MyBatis.

You can even pair that down a little further if you use the built-in HttpServer that's been in the JDK since 1.6.

Even servlet containers are the wrong approach. I have from experience it’s best to stick to libraries. You know where you are when you call a function. The Servlet spec now includes annotation scanning by default now, which is unnecessarily complicated and slows down start up.