I can't stand any magic, it always inevitably feels like a massive liability to me and always bites me in the ass sooner or later.

I use http://sparkjava.com in my projects. It's as tiny as web frameworks get, it only handles routing and request/response, and you get to do everything else manually. Only thing I had to hack into it was response streaming. The one most internally convoluted and enterprise-y dependency I use is, surprisingly, the official MySQL driver. GraalVM complains about it as well.