I worked on a Spring Boot application that would take more than a minute to start. Not Spring's fault, IIUC, but nevertheless a focus killer.

A minute? What was taking so long? Spring itself is only a few seconds (as you said that’s not the issue).

That sounds horrible to work on.

If you have many beans that does IO, startup will be slower. For example, just removing sql/database initialization can shave off a second.