[antonvs]

These days you'd typically use Spring Boot, which is a layer over Spring that simplifies its use significantly. As others have pointed out, none of this is JavaEE.

Frameworks like Spring are absolutely essential for many kinds of business software. Sure, there are slightly more focused alternatives like Micronaut (and Quarkus for that matter), but they tend to have more specific use cases.

In practice, teams that try to write real-world business systems without such frameworks end up with a spaghettified mess that just illustrates a variation of Greenspun's 10th rule: Any sufficiently complicated Java program without a framework contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of one-tenth of Spring.