I never had this issue with Java frameworks. I could drop into a large Java codebase almost anywhere and quickly get a lay of the land.
I have worked in several languages sever side and I have never had a problem jumping into a codebase until I had a Ruby project to join.
Maybe any technology seems magical until you understand it. I see at least as much magic in Java as Ruby now.
There's a lot of reflection magic but it's not the wild west like Ruby can be because there's limits on what you can do to a class file once it's loaded. It's mostly limited to peeking at annotations on fields and methods and calling those methods or reading fields.
You can't redefine the methods or fields on an object at runtime, which prevents a lot of misguided insanity.