> The fact that finished code looks great and reads well doesn't balance the scales in my book.

IMO this is because software engineers both get bored and feel a need to compete. The more abstract they can make code the better (more safe?) they feel. That lets them play chess on their terms and eliminate the competition. But that's just my take, I may be wrong. Fortunately the most commonly used gems wrap this abstraction into usable APIs, and most have good documentation.

While this can be correctly attributed to ruby or the devs in its ecosystem, I've been on teams with staff using other languages and stacks that let their completion/anxiety fly making it hard to read and understand their code. I guess my point is it's a good critique, but it falls beyond the meta programming in ruby.