Sadly, it seems that most of the java devs who created these monstrosities learned the wrong lessons.
As far as I can tell they seem to think total lines of code was the real issue (It couldn't be the Abstractions/Patterns, those are good!) and are now on a kick to move as many lines of code as possible to annotations. I call this "Annotation based programming" and any new problem starts with a google search since how any tool kit handles something is pure guesswork.
If you're going to denounce annotations, you must also denounce decorators in both Python and Javascript. Annotations are a super powerful tool that get used too much. To borrow from Lisp: data > functions > macros. They should be the last tool you reach to, in order to remove a bunch of repetition with the intention of simplifying your code. "Could you do what you're trying to do with a library of functions that you simply call into? Or some sort of composition? Or maybe a parent class?" type questions should be asked before you reach for any sort of metaprogramming.
Take a look at the Retrofit library from Square for a good example of usage of annotations. To the original Spring link posted, while there's lots of annotations, they're replacing the XML that used to plague Spring projects, which I find much more magical. At least I can jump to an annotation's definition in my IDE.
As far as I can tell they seem to think total lines of code was the real issue (It couldn't be the Abstractions/Patterns, those are good!) and are now on a kick to move as many lines of code as possible to annotations. I call this "Annotation based programming" and any new problem starts with a google search since how any tool kit handles something is pure guesswork.