[ibejoeb]

I have an opinion on why. If you were in that world 25+ years ago, you'll be familiar with the landscape. There were a dozen popular application servers, each with 15 versions in the wild, all running on premises, and you had to ship software to customers who had wildly different operations. It helped. It's verbose. As you said, this mostly attributable to JEE and projects that traded build time complexity and home-grown code for abstraction complexity.

I had to support systems from IBM, BEA, Apache, Red Hat, SAP, and some I'm certainly forgotten. Then there were the piecemeal systems. OSGi made an appearance. Then you have databases from Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. Identity and auth was the wild west, with countless SSO vendors, wacky LDAP implementations, wackier SAML implementations, Kerberos, Ping... Despite that, it was pretty feasible to build and ship the same artifacts and configure things at the site.