For sure. As someone who has stayed away from this part of the biz, infrastructure always looked like makework to me. Necessary, mind you, but still makework that was indicative of poor/insufficient computing primitives for services.

> it seems like JVM is experience a bit of a comeback with a few companies adopting Kotlin for backend

JVM 21 adding virtual threads, and Spring Boot 3.2 using them with one line of config is huge. We can now write simple code that looks blocking and let the runtime handle it instead of writing async function/await everywhere. Personally I'm loving Spring Boot 3.2 with Kotlin, especially for the fact that I can bundle scheduled jobs, API, and frontend all in one place for my indie projects. Plus the JVM world of devs seems to have a somewhat decent appreciation of how to make web services that aren't rife with unnecessary coupling.

The bad? There is a legendary amount of cargo-culting blog posts and questionable advice around Spring Boot, often for older versions.