My observation from my long career of writing enterprise apps is that frameworks are super complicated with many hidden variables, so when you apply them to a complicated business problem you end up with the square of the complications of both systems.
We ended up in framework hell. In response, we ditched all the frameworks we were using, went to pure JavaSE, and ended up with a (much!) faster, more reliable enterprise application that was far, far easier to maintain.
I had this experience with the so-called "app servers" at our company. We also have a daily batch processing system has tons of operational support, db+serivice monitoring, a very useful web UI, logging split out, authorization system etc. It's built around common Nix concepts like files, pids, pipes, etc. Thousands of these batch jobs are little JavaSE programs that launch, do their business, record their progress and report success or failure. Some are python programs and behave the same way.
Our JEE apps were deployed to these app servers with very little internal support or expertise that very often had devs having to physically log onto production hosts and figure what in the world was wrong, restarting the app server, grepping logs and in general having to learn about these app servers (and usually just shrugging their shoulders at what went wrong). The sum total of things you had to know to keep the JEE deployments up was as much as you had to know about Nix processes PLUS you still had to know all the Nix stuff, except none of the JEE infra was built out since the app servers were just these monstrous processes with hundreds of db connections and thousands of threads.
My team long ago ditched JEE style deployments and have our apps all managed with the batch processing system and have been none of the better for it. Some* of those apps use Spring/Boot but I we've been doing a decent job in the code reviews of just rejecting anything too auto-magikal. Other teams that have stuck with these massive app-servers have stagnated since the deployments are so frail, no one dares make large changes. This is mostly an institutional problem but still the end result was sticking to simpler JavaSE stuff has led to way more productivity.
Yeah your experience absolutely mirrors mine. Don’t even get me started on JPA; I’ve used exactly the same phrasing you did: when you use JPA, now you have to know SQL, JPA and JQL. It makes no sense!
We ended up in framework hell. In response, we ditched all the frameworks we were using, went to pure JavaSE, and ended up with a (much!) faster, more reliable enterprise application that was far, far easier to maintain.