Spot-on analysis. I work on a team (that strongly prefers using Kotlin) in the CI-CD world. Despite web dev only being a minor part of our work, Spring just attaches itself to everything like a disease. I feel like it has gotten to the point where most Java developers that interview know Spring and not Java. Dependencies themselves also become attached to Spring (our example: bringing in Kafka -- super painful without Spring and hardly any examples or docs.)
This "containerizing" is very unique to Java -- I've never seen anything like it in the other various languages I've used. I won't even mention the total disaster of JavaEE containers.