I have no beef with spring, found it useful and not that much complicated in the past. That does not mean I'm going to use it in every new project I'm about to start.
I found Spring libraries to be useful. I don't doubt there are people who abused it as well.
Controller: Add an @Controller annotation and some @RequestMappings and you're done.
Model: Usually these have no Spring dependency at all, though there are annotations you could put on some of the fields for various tasks if you'd like.
View: Also mostly unrelated to Spring. Write a Thymeleaf template or JSP and return the name of it from the appropriate controller method.
I don't think it's unreasonable to prefer the simpler projects that the smaller frameworks are a good fit for, of course! Sometimes though the project is big enough that something like Spring is going to save you time and headaches in the medium and long run.
I do think I prefer the java way more, because it's a bit easier to debug. But once I have some solid java code, I can be tempted to lift out 30 lines of code if it has an analogous 5 lines of xml config.