No, dear Internet adversary. There is a reason why the framework landscape looks the way it does. You can see proof of my point in every job ad there is and frankly, I'm quite disappointed really. Cool companies and interesting ideas get solved by using 19 century tech, so the technical state of the art remains where it has been since forever.

This makes me bitter. I constructed my own DI frameworks in the early 2000:s when I did Java. Trying to find interesting places to work now means that I get to work in new codebases that look exactly the same as they did 15-20 years ago. Why is that? Have we learned nothing?

I honestly don't even understand your position here. Are you trying to claim that Java is as useful for a normal team of software developers without using Spring Boot?

My first 10 years of Scala, I never even once thought about looking for a lightweight framework for managing shared state, DI and/or configuration management. I'll happily concede that working with ZIO is a dream, however. But it is truthfully not needed the way Spring Boot really is for Java to be modern and useful.

Same goes for JavaScript in the browser.

It isn't really about the lack of powerful tools at your fingertips, it's that you cannot make them in pure Java. You have to "cheat" but resorting to an emulation layer so that you can apply transforms and abstract lifecycle concept. We called them cross cutting concerns in 2003-2004. As in: how do you correctly (read: typesafely) construct a unit of work, correctly configured, with the correct dependencies and correctly interacting with caches and databases for all the 4000 features?

In Haskell, you'll easily solve it with a few functions, the usual combinators and the reader monad. In Java, this is Spring Boot quite literally. You need this stack to traverse ground.

Without such a type system and the ability to abstract over functions, you either invent it yourself with tests instead of types and adapters/bytecode weaving/code generation instead of functions and monads or you use a framework. Both work and probably work just as well.

Without the framework, you have to make it. And there is a basically 100% proof of this in Job Ads. This is what I am critical of.

The fact that you want to win over this because your unmentioned company has several frontends that you claim don't use or invent any frameworks is just weak sauce.