I'm pretty fond of Java; it's definitely a superior language to Go if you ask me, which I've also written a ton of code in.
But I stay away from Spring Boot, end the entire EE stack of crap that came before it, if at all possible.
I've had more success adding whatever I need on top of embedded Jetty.
It's mostly a cultural problem, no one is forcing you to go the AdapterFacadeInjectionBuilderWhatever way.
I've been working on a library to simplify interfacing with relational databases for a while now. With several implementations in Go and other languages. And the java version looks at least as nice as the rest to my eyes:
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