Yes, i was part of the cult in my early days as programmer. I would endlessly create abstractions over abstractions. But the whole madness started for valid reasons.

Im the early days of Java on the web, you had servlets and JSP. Servlets were miserable to write, and JSPs were basically PHP with Java. Those were the days before JSON and yaml, when XML was king.

So people wanted to abstract their way out of JSP and XML, so they created layers to isolate the nasty parts and make it easier to write actual Java code. So a few ideas emerged/frameworks, some ideas emerged: ORM, EJBs, Struts, JSF, template frameworks, and finally Spring which was the lightweight one, if you can believe it. People experienced with various patterns and frameworks. Eventually Spring won, and then Spring started to use annotations, JSON became more popular, etc., the code became less and less verbose.

Some Java developers never made the mental jump and are still creating huge piles of abstractions because this is what they’ve learned from their seniors.