I'm doing server-side Kotlin as well, with Spring Boot. I initially was against the idea of Spring Boot, because I had memories of using the old bloated Spring Framework from 10+ years ago with giant XML files full of bean definitions and coding-in-XML horribleness with Apache Ivy and Ant. Oh, yea, I also was using all of the above with OSGi as well (Never use OSGi. Ever).
But, Spring Boot is much more modular and I'm impressed with compile and startup speeds. No more XML - unless you want to, but not on my project :) It also supports automagic docker image building using build packs, which keeps the size of images down (not as small as a service built using Go or node, but not as horribly big as you'd expect from Java).
I still have a preference for Clojure and integrating small libraries, but on larger projects where you're working with other devs and need to get moving quickly, Kotlin + Spring Boot is a powerful combo that's hard to argue against :)
Springboot still has not solved the issue with bad dependencies at runtime being an easy debuggable experience. I still struggle after several years pinpointing where exactly my springboot app crashed, because stack traces are perhaps several hundred lines long in some cases.
But, Spring Boot is much more modular and I'm impressed with compile and startup speeds. No more XML - unless you want to, but not on my project :) It also supports automagic docker image building using build packs, which keeps the size of images down (not as small as a service built using Go or node, but not as horribly big as you'd expect from Java).
I still have a preference for Clojure and integrating small libraries, but on larger projects where you're working with other devs and need to get moving quickly, Kotlin + Spring Boot is a powerful combo that's hard to argue against :)