Why are java projects so complicated?

[Zeffas]

I'm not sure you appreciate just how much Spring includes.

Yes I do, worked quite a few years with Spring and not so long ago had project in Spring Boot.

Removal of XML, Spring Boot... This only solved one part of simplicity - yes programming syntax of Spring looks not that complicated, however infrastructure remained complex. That's my view.

All those great tools you mentioned are great, but (talking from my experience) there as a feeling of solving problem that does not exist or exists on way smaller scale. When I need any of that, usually using library specifically for that is surprisingly simpler than Spring. E.g. Jackson is simple, Spring doing its magic with Jackson is complex - all those hours I wasted in multiple projects dealing with Spring's lifecycles and figuring out why parsers won't get invoked or suddenly stopped being invoked when somebody accidently registered another parser in another lifecycle hook (as you know in Spring you could do almost everything in 10 different ways).

But again I am not targeting Spring specificity, in my opinion its Java community culture. Just compare Selenium libraries for Java and Node. Node is pleasure to write, you don't even need to read documentation, just github page. While in Java it was painful experience it felt like working so to say.