This is an alternative solution for those already set by @ BeñatBermejo and @AkashRaveendran above. I am glad that Akash was able to make his system work by simply cleaning the environment, but I found that in my case this is not enough.
The error came from the jackson-databind, which I had in my version 2.8.1. However, since I also have Spring, the dependencies on Jackson-databind, namely jackson-core, are still at 2.6.6.
All I had to do was remove the version specifier in my jsonson-databind dependency. When I did this, Maven instead used a version called Spring, 2.6.6, which did not include a call to JsonFormat $ Value.empty ().
If you need some jackson 2.7+ features, you can try specifying a higher version of jackson-core and any other dependencies of the jackson artifact that you are trying to use.
However, with Spring, I would either see if you can get around the bottom version of Jackson that he calls, or see if Spring can release a new version that includes the newer jackson libraries. Reconfiguring the Spring dependency structure undermines one of the biggest reasons for using Spring in the first place: you get a more fully tested set of interrelated dependencies for building right out of the box.