Yes, i was part of the cult in my early days as programmer. I would endlessly create abstractions over abstractions. But the whole madness started for valid reasons.

Im the early days of Java on the web, you had servlets and JSP. Servlets were miserable to write, and JSPs were basically the java interpretation of having a PHP. Those were the days before JSON and yaml, when XML was king.

So people wanted to abstract their way out of JSP and XML, so they created layers to isolate the nasty parts and make it easier to write actual Java code. So a few ideas emerged/frameworks: ORMs, EJBs, Struts, JSF, template frameworks, and finally Spring which was the lightweight one, if you can believe it. A lot of those ideas coming from the Java world were exported into various other languages in a selective ways.

People experienced with various patterns and frameworks. Eventually Spring won, and then Spring started to use annotations, JSON became more popular, etc., the code became less and less verbose.

Some Java developers never made the mental jump and are still creating huge piles of abstractions because this is what they've learned from their seniors.

I felt the same way coming back to Java from Kotlin. The more streamlined syntax of Kotlin is so much more comfortable to read and write. That being said, I never had an issue with using Jackson for JSON serialization in Java. I'm curious what issues you have encountered and if you have any alternative suggestions that are nicer to use in Java?

Lombok will shrink the 200 lines of getters and setters to one or two. It has its own pitfalls of course, but IMO it's definitely worth it.

Allow is a strong word. For many companies, development represents dollars. IT and Security are important, but in these companies if the development group wants old tech they get old tech.