> which is something that I would have said would never happen if you had asked me five years ago.

I think a lot of people are noticing the changes Java has had in the previous years. The language has made a lot of improvements, and I feel that the mind set of the community has changed. The old enterprise way of factories and unnecessary abstractions have lost a lot of popularity, and is mostly still alive in legacy software/teams and universities who have not yet caught up.

Even Spring Boot is now a valid approach for getting sh*t done for startups. There are of course frameworks that are more light weight, or you can start from scratch and choose your own libraries to keep the size down. But SB is simply good enough for most use cases, and even supports native compilation now.