How do you square that away with its use in the standard library, and many third party libraries? Someone’s gotta write the reflection code.
To take one common use case for reflection, Json marshalling/unmarshalling, if I were writing an application that needed to do this, and for some reason I could not use a library, I absolutely would not use reflection, but would write code that specifically targeted the classes that I was marshalling/unmarshalling. Conversely, if I’m writing a library, I don’t know what those classes are so I must use reflection to manage this. That’s the key difference here.