> So you end up with this hodgepodge which never gets updated until it reaches a critical point where it cannot continue to run on your infrastructure, and it forces a big migration project.
This matches my experience, literally took months to migrate an older Spring project to something with fewer CVEs and bugs. Created some new bugs and issues along the way, including one where compiling it on Windows would produce a .jar that runs fine, whereas compiling it on Linux changed something in how the Spring beans are initialized, leading to it failing to even start (the settings for allowing lazy initialization changed nothing).
> Using a selection of libraries to build up the elements of a web service, and creating your own high-level abstractions for utilizing them, does require an additional time investment, but it leaves you in more control to do upgrades piece by piece, and to pivot the way things work when it is needed.
Yes and no. If you only wire things up, then sure. But depending on how much code your devs have to write (and depending on the devs), you might actually end up with a bespoke mess if you have to dig into writing various base mechanisms (think transaction handling, scheduled tasks, task pools for parallel execution, key/value stores and caching, validations, auditing and metrics, file uploads and downloads etc.) - one that will have less documentation than something like Spring Boot, you won't be able to ask anyone how to solve issues in it, alongside sometimes just having architectures that neither scale nor work properly, because it isn't something battle tested over literal decades.
> I feel like the Go ecosystem follows the latter approach more than most, and it was bit of a mindset shift for me at first, but I've grown to appreciate it.
I still agree with this, to me it feels like the correct approach is indeed to give you most of the tools you might need for the technical bits and make you (or other devs) only write a bit of glue to wire everything up, to order how data moves through your system (resources, services, validators, repositories etc.) according to whatever business rules you might have. Things really go south when you miss out on that detail.
In the Java land, I think Dropwizard is a good example of that: it uses a bunch of mostly idiomatic libraries that are well tested, without being quite as rigid as Spring (and Spring Boot), letting you set things up as you please and also not getting in the way too much: https://www.dropwizard.io/en/stable/getting-started.html
In Go, I really like that a lot of the stuff is already present in the standard library.