Spring boot 2.4 - must provide an explicit region in the builder or setup environment to supply a region

Question

I'm using Spring Boot 2.4.5 and Spring Cloud 2.3.1 and referred to these docs to implement an S3 service in my Spring boot project - spring blog and spring cloud documentation.

My configurations are as shown below.

pom.xml

----------------------------------
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.awspring.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-aws-autoconfigure</artifactId>
  <version>2.3.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>io.awspring.cloud</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-cloud-aws-context</artifactId>
  <version>2.3.1</version>
</dependency>
----------------------------------
<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.awspring.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-cloud-aws-dependencies</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.1</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

application.yml

cloud:
  aws:
    credentials:
      access-key: <access-key>
      secret-key: <secret-key>
    region:
      static: us-east-2
    s3:
      region: us-east-2

Bean config - Wonder why I have to create this bean, because Spring boot should have done this. But without this it said "no such bean".

@Bean
public AmazonS3 amazonS3() {
    return AmazonS3ClientBuilder.defaultClient();
}

On running the app, getting this error. What could be the issue? Please note that there might be some aws configs in my system, but I believe it will be overridden by application.yml values. I even deleted ~/.aws folder and tried again, but not working.

Error creating bean with name 'amazonS3'. Must provide an explicit region in the builder or setup environment to supply a region

Found this issue in many blogs, but everything points to Java AWS SDK and they all saying to configure ~/.aws values, which I don't want to do.