I think when Spring dies, Java will probably be dead too. Although I don't expect either in the near future. True, but Grails still has nothing on Spring Boot/Micronaut when it comes to annotations. Micronaut has annotations for everything including, but not limited to Controllers, Domain objects(if you use gorm), and many other things. I'm not against annotations, but I do find that Spring Boot and Micronaut can get noisy with the number of annotations, where I prefer some of the Grails way of convention over the config.

@Transactional

and

@Service

are notable exceptions. As for the traits they provide a lot of the ASTs did but are easier to write/maintain. Both ASTs and traits can be added at compile-time based on my experience with a side project. A while back I had a side project(Micro Grails) that brought Grails like convention over configuration to Micronaut(pre Grails 4), applying the annotations at compile-time based off a config. I spun off of that project Enterprise Groovy which applies static compilation by default with optional enforcement. In the sping off I figured out how to keep the config passing to the ASTs that made the project work going in Gradle 5+. At some point, I should go back to Micro Grails and actually make that a working thing, incorporating what I learned in the Enterprise Groovy project. I also think I've figured out a way to generate GDSL based on my config so I could maintain IDE help...