Yes, but as a programmer when I'd start working on a new project, I would call it a Rails project, I've never heard of a Lombok project.

Sure, I've seen Spring/J2EE projects that used Lombok... some 10 years ago, but the idea seemed to have died down, maybe it's my own bubble.

Automagic is ok for a specific type of problem (Rails for webaps?), Lombok however reminds me a bit of the promises of AOP which failed to gain traction outside frameworks.

There are other highly opinionated frameworks/stacks that have mixed adoption in the java world -- jhipster seemed to gain some traction, but people seem to just use bare spring boot nowadays(which is quite opinionated)

I don't have absolutely anything against small projects, I'd love to work more on smaller projects, but 18000 lines of generated code is NOTHING, try to convince a medium team to use Lombok, you'll very soon end up with people loving or hating it, removing it for debugging purposes, creating their own generators and very soon it's a real mess. But all that is just my experience, I'm not trying to dismiss Lombok or any approach, if it works for you, great!

I recall my limited time with Ruby and Rails being the really frustrating, seconded probably only by Tornado (either misleading error messages or no error messages whatsoever, requiring me to get dirty with the debugger for the most minor of things).

RubyMine had no idea about more than half of the Ruby code being written in the project. I couldn't grasp the concept of symbols in Ruby reliably enough. E.g. methods used either symbols or strings - I couldn't discern a pattern for which to be used when. This was the magic part of it - things seemed to work seamlessly but when they wouldn't, I had no idea where should I even begin to look.

Also every file had to be annotated for the strings to be treated as immutable. No ways to set it globally, project-wide.

It felt like a mess. On the plus side, there were gems.

Good point!