> If you want to go with “battle-hardened and industry-proven”, use the Spring ecosystem.
Well, uh, there it is.
As a Rails fan who was forced to use Java for a web application at a previous job, I've been all over this whole topic, and even ranted about it on this site a couple times. This is the conclusion I came to: some people like to have things done for them by a framework, valuing the tradeoff of time vs. specificity, and some people like to write a lot of extra code themselves, valuing the precision that affords, at the expense of time.
The working example I took away from the exercise was that writing a simple edit page with a nested model. It took me 3 lines of code in Rails, with a few dozen more from the generators. (Cocoon is freaking magical.) In Java/Spring/Node.js, it took me 160, and I still wasn't done. I needed repeated classes, controllers, and services in 2 languages in 2 stacks. One of the arguments I see a lot in this field is how people are fans of strict types in the Java world. OK, but it seems to be a requirement to keep Java and Javascript sorted, and is a non-trivial amount of work to keep in sync.
Some people get hung up on, say, race conditions of database validations, or mock database transparency as useless, or argue about which ecosystem has more plugins (Node "wins!"), and some people think it's ridiculous to duplicate 90% of the plumbing, or hate having to deal with migrations manually, or find it inconceivable that there's not one single canonical example of a working Spring/Node CRUD app in a current version of the stack available on the entirety of the internet.
To the last point: THAT is how fragmented the "Spring" world is to learn and apply. THIS is the tradeoff in NOT being opinionated. In nine months of pulling my hair out, I never once found 2 examples that did ANYTHING the same way, and NOTHING was current and complete, not even stuff by Matt Raible. I even contacted him directly, and the best he could do was point me at a GitHub project I had never been able to bubble up with Google, which was 3 versions out of date, and would no longer work the same way with current versions of the stack.
To each their own. Horses for courses. Your milage may vary. Terms and conditions may apply. It's almost like a "right-left" dichotomy of politics.
Anyway, I leveled up my career, and now I get to pick what tools I use. But, yes, I'm still bitter on this topic. ;-)