[throwaway2030]

I genuinely like Java and find Spring Boot enables me to be more productive and let me focus on the business logic. Spring Boot may seem a bit scary for junior developers with its focus on "magical" annotations, but once you get past the initial learning threshold it really pays off relatively quickly due to the eco system of modules that work well together.

There are of course smaller Java frameworks that you can use if you have made an honest try and dont like Spring, but the eco system is hard to beat. Go also does not have any benefits that are of any real value to me. I have admittedly not tried Elixir, but it seems to me that the mature eco system around Java is better for someone like me who is not interested in spending time on less mature 3rd party dependencies. I like the concept behind Phoenix Liveview, so I will try it sometime.

Java as a language has improved a lot recently, and while there it could be better at handling nulls, it's not enough to make me choose Kotlin.

If you had told me I would have Java+Spring Boot as my first choice 10 years ago, I would have doubted you. Java at the time seemed to stagnate, but this has changed .