With the introduction of HttpMessageConverters in 7.0, we deprecated a few methods in WebMvcConfigurer (like configureMessageConverters) that are now outdated. By default, the HttpMessageConverters builder is created with the registration of default converters activated.

With the now deprecated methods, developers were able to undo this auto-detection by mutating the list of converters directly. This is not impossible, unless applications override WebMvcConfigurationSupport#createMessageConverters.

We should add an option to disable auto-detection of converters to restore this capability.