In the early 2000s, Java developers used servlets and EJBs to develop their server applications. Hibernate and Spring came along in 2002 and 2004. Both technologies had a huge impact on Java developers everywhere, showing them it was possible to write distributed, robust applications without EJBs.
Fast forward to 2018, and Java EE certainly doesn’t look like it used to! Now, it’s mostly POJOs and annotations and far simpler to use.