Excitement is hardly the term I would use… it’s also old. It’s also outdated. Spring is done without corporate sponsorship or leadership. It died during the pivotal/vmware/handoff days.
In your opinion, is there a better option than Spring Boot right now in the Java ecosystem? For what it does, at least. I know there are a lot of libraries and frameworks out there but not all are as complete as Spring Boot.
I remember all the excitement about Spring Cloud... But that was back in 2017.
I never thought of Spring (or Spring Boot) as good technology, but even for the right audience Spring boot is as exciting as React is exciting for frontend developers or C is exciting for kernel developers. It's a pretty established technology that was new and cool at one point and has just become commonplace and boring for better or worse (I would argue worse, but that's just me).