So it turned out I was missing this dependency in my pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
<artifactId>tomcat-embed-jasper</artifactId>
<version>7.0.26</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
The tutorial said that it is needed for processing JSPs and since my app didn't use JSPs I didn't include it, but as it turned out, it is needed.