You need to take the library approach. It's much like react vs angular. With angular, and spring, you get a ton out of the box but much is mediocre.

Like React, you can out together your own "best of breed" java stack. It just takes a lot more work.

Look to replace one component at a time. For DI Guice or Dagger2. For REST Vert.X or Jersey. Logging Logback. Metrics, DropWizard Metrics. OAuth ScribeJava. Hibernate for Spring Data.

Take a look at the "awesome java" repos and choose your poison.

I'll warn you now that while you can end up with something far better you lose the coherency of Spring. Of your organization doesn't have a good "apprentice" setup all the new devs will be utterly and hopelessly lost. And good luck finding a Dev that knows 20+ libraries vs "Spring".

Rolling the libs was worth it for us but probably not a lot of eng orgs

If you're just looking for a drop-in Spring replacement you can't go wrong with DropWizard. It's a solid combo of best-of-breed libraries and has quiet support/adoption by many huge companies