Kubernetes is what I would call very advanced use case.

But that's the thing with Java, yes there are libraries for everything and one could see that as a problem actually.

Spring was mentioned before, but it's the perfect example of an overengineered/ heavy library that does a lot of black magic.

Java is strange because it can be both verbose and magical at the same time.

Just the other day I ran across an issue where spring was wiring things up correctly on Linux but not Windows.

I too dislike dependency injection frameworks. I try to always wire manually myself. I'm tired of debugging old SpringFramework apps where changing the JVM by a patch level or changing one JAR dependency breaks the wiring. I have seen it too many times to count.

Originally prototyped in Java, rewritten in Go when a couple of advocates joined the team.

If all you have is spring boot, everything looks like a spring boot problem.

Plus Spring is honestly quite badly programmed.

The pagination object is bulky and unnecessarily complex, where a simple offset/limit is enough (and a nextUrl for cursor-based access).

When we looked into cluster locks, they’re not even released if one node goes down. I mean, who would need a lock implementation that just stores a line in a DB? And the doc doesn’t even warn about it.

Apache contributors were much better-skilled.

    Apache contributors were much better-skilled.

That is quite a broad statement. Two negative points about Apache Java libraries I can think of: The original "lang" libraries have not aged well at all. Also: The HTTP client libs are a fiasco. Very challenging APIs and weak documentation.