platform smell and "In fact, EJB encourages collaboration of *more than six* different parties"

 I like to think I have a fair nose for coding technologies. (Admittedly, this nose works best when the industry shares the same preferences for simplicity and transparency over "do it for you" trends) For example, I knew the JSON was going to eat XML's lunch, and that React was just a better idea than early Angular. (Heh - I just ran into my deep dive into my reservations about Angular circa 2014)

EJBs, "Enterprise JavaBeans", was kind of a darling technology around the turn of the century, on the back half of the dot com run. It was a way of conflating in-memory objects with rows in a database. (If this sounds like a recipe for stuff that just doesn't scale, you're right... as I said at the time... EJBs allow you to distribute your db across many machines, and offer performance that assures that you'll need to...)

One early example of "warning bells clanging" - this passage from a book on EJBs: (I think some version of "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans")

That is to say:

To get an EJB deployment up and running successfully, you need more than just an application server and components. In fact, EJB encourages collaboration of more than six different parties. [emphasis theirs]

Wow. Even with the disclaimer below it that it's "not for everyone"...yikes. Reading, I think it's talking about 6 human experts, not like "6 susbsystems" or something...