People are critical of Spring because they have seen it in production and in practical projects. And fall in the naive trap that somehow the tools and the libraries are the reasons why a real-life software project is messy.
However Spring is something that has stood the test of time and is used in thousands of actual projects. And Spring itself emerge out of practical software development with plenty of competing alternatives (Guice, classic J2EE plus many others).
The mentioned alternatives in article: Micronaut and Quarkus are not much beyound the demo state, and frankly based on some questionable ideas: Compile-time dependency injection and idea of "cloud native" - that somehow things run better in the cloud if they are compiled into a binary.