bean creation error when starting spring boot application

To elaborate on @M-deinum’s comment, setting Spring Boot version to 2.3.4.RELEASE (instead of 2.4.2 in my case) solved the issue. In gradle this meant changing:

plugins {
    id 'org.springframework.boot' version '2.4.2'
    ...
}

To

plugins {
    id 'org.springframework.boot' version '2.3.4.RELEASE'
    ...
}