Nah, Hibernate, Spring and most major Java frameworks have largely moved away from XML. It's still supported, but these days it's mostly configured in the code directly, with properties loaded from yaml, JSON or the environment (for containers).

The JDK ecosystem is in a pretty good spot nowadays. With Spring boot you can whip up a productions ready back-end very fast, or if you prefer a more hands-on approach there are lighter frameworks/libraries quarkus or micronaut.

The Java language itself has evolved fast and is actually pretty nice now, and if you prefer something more modern akin to TS or swift you can just use Kotlin which is almost 100% interoperable with Java.