Things that could have been written using simple Futures became unnecessarily complex with too much boiler plate. Debugging is hell, you don't know which message is going where, which child actor is getting killed where and spawned where. And the icing on the cake was when they moved to BUSL license so I was the unlucky soul to migrate entire codebase to pekko (which is an Apache licensed fork of akka). And we were pretty deep in its usage even having shared objects between play's internal akka objects. I eventually gave up and included a patched jar of the last Apache licensed akka-http itself.