What you wrote matches my experience. Not that I approve of it, of course, but it is often like that.
"The senior in the team is in charge of deciding what approach to use."
The only thing I'd like to add is that the senior is rarely free in their decision. It is often an unspoken choice dictated by culture and upper management. (Ironically it's worse in companies with technically apt management.)
You work in a Java shop, everything else than the couple of standard Java frameworks will be an uphill battle and you bear all the risk to get your problems blamed on your framework choice.
This is not an excuse of course, but unfortunately our choices are rarely by technical merit alone.
That's a really common trend today even outside of frameworks and software development. It's super common for people to make a worse choice when they know a better one is right in front of them, because blame if the worse choice fails will be diffused, but blame if the better choice fails will be placed entirely on them.
Not only that, but let’s face it, a popular Java framework is going to be far more stable and long lived for years to come compared to what someone grabs off GitHub. A business sticks around for a long time. Some guy building with the flavor of the month is a big problem.
"The senior in the team is in charge of deciding what approach to use."
The only thing I'd like to add is that the senior is rarely free in their decision. It is often an unspoken choice dictated by culture and upper management. (Ironically it's worse in companies with technically apt management.)
You work in a Java shop, everything else than the couple of standard Java frameworks will be an uphill battle and you bear all the risk to get your problems blamed on your framework choice.
This is not an excuse of course, but unfortunately our choices are rarely by technical merit alone.