I wanted to post a rant about Spring and all, but the thing is so fucking huge I'm not even sure which part should I hate first, if any at all

It's a big framework, but you'll find the core "day to day" stuff you use ends up being a rather small subset. Also look at spring boot if you haven't already - that's the way forward these days (makes it simpler again for the common use cases, with fewer annotations.)

@AlmondSauce I'm using Spring boot, but I don't like Basic Authentication, and persuading it to use JWT authentication has been a pain. I somehow got through it, but it took so much time because the thing is just so complicated and there are so many guides -not many of which are well written, and those that are all explain different parts of the process, so mixing together is quite a pain.