I thought that the whole point of Lombok is that it's not reflection based, they explicitly refuse to use reflection as a design principle. Afaik lombok statically generates methods and classes at pre compile. That's why for example lombok does not support constructor inheritance or overloading.

thanks for extracting the original post. i only put the linkedin as a source because you can clearly see java champions on social media speaking out against lombok (which you obviously cant on the original post)

There's no magic in lombok, they're just meta annotations for class generation, no different than having each end every class implement some very specific interface exactly the same way every time. It's for reducing copy pasting. Debugging it is not a problem, especially that you can see the generated classes in the library files. Spring on the other hand is a black box, because it does too much and has become very bloated over the years, the goal of Spring is not to avoid using new the point is simplifying dependency injection and composition. The most fried part is the transaction management imo, because it's too delicate in the way it has to be configured.