Assuming you're focused on writing reusable steps and building up a solid test architecture I don't see cucumber costing you time. You also really shouldn't need to go to code that often to debug a test failure. Write better test frameworks, write tests for your tests, and self report issues in your test framework when they come up. E.g. unable to create test fixture -> this->skipped("reason");

In my experience the ability to just plug and play steps and quickly add additional coverage for edge cases is a huge bonus for test automation.

But again you have to actually engineer things and write reusable steps and intelligent enough test frameworks that you don't need to often dig through the test code.

I think this issue is somewhat similar to how when writing unit tests you'll want to build up a library of reusable custom asserts targeting your domain so you can quickly exercise your sut and validate things. It's definitely an upfront costs to build things up like that but in the long run it pays off very nicely when you avoid taking on too much test debt.