> The author's point about the friction from explicit step wrappers is fair, as we don't use bytecode generation today, but we're actively exploring it to improve DX.

There is value in such a wrapper/call at invocation time instead of using the proxy pattern. Specifically, it makes it very clear to both the code author and code reader that this is not a normal method invocation. This is important because it is very common to perform normal method invocations and the caller needs to author code knowing the difference. Java developers, perhaps more than most, likely prefer such invocation explicitness over a JVM agent doing byte code manip.

There is also another reason for preferring a wrapped-like approach - providing options. If you need to provide options (say timeout info) from the call site, it is hard to do if your call is limited to the signature of the implementation and options will have to be provided in a different place.