I do a lot of java development (even in my free time, voluntarily). I find it helps a lot when you avoid the Spring ecosystem, really anything that's popular or buzzword:y. The more buzzwords there are and the more start-ups you find on the project page, the more of your day you spend programming in some more or less undocumented YAML dialect, desperately piecing together snippets you don't understand from outdated tutorials and remarks on stack overflow.
As I mentioned in a comment earlier today, frameworks make the easy things easier and the hard things harder. If your needs are to build a really basic CRUD app, then sure, Spring is nice. But since it probably isn't, if indeed you're doing something else more than a hello world TODO app, then it's an unimaginable pain in the ass, and it's a lot easier to cobble together what subset of its features you need from other libraries.