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Yeah... that immediately was a red flag for inexperience. Not to mention when hes "not sure" if things were cleaned up. How have you been programming for 10 years and don't know how to properly clean up records, whether its through the database, ORM, or manually in a transaction.

It sounds like this guy has sucked on the rails teet for far too long, instead of challenging himself with other approaches and paradigms.

Do you have any resources to expand on the issues with AR callbacks? I'm interested to read up on this.

AR callbacks can also make it harder to write tests.

In short: you lose control of what is happening, especially when you expand/inherit other classes. These kind of problems arise after few months of development, when the codebase is grown enough and starts becoming even more difficult to change or extend.

Try to check Trailblazer for a different approach.

What would you use instead?

Commands (or Service Objects) are a better approach. Isolating business logic and actions let you keep the control of what's going on.