1. It leaves out parentheses in places where they really should be there for clarity. Ok it's not nearly as bad as e.g. OCaml, but it's still a downside.

2. Basically Ruby code seems to favour magically generating methods and variables based on other strings, which makes them impossible to search for.

Other languages sometimes do that too, e.g. ill-advised __dict__ Python tricks, or with macros in C++ or Rust. But it's definitely worse in Ruby, and it's a common complaint (search for "magic" in these comments).

I literally have given up following Gitlab's code before. That never happens in better languages, e.g. I can easily follow VSCode's codebase (Typescript) or gitlab-runner (Go).