No, a lot of java critics complain about it being hard to tell what's calling what at the framework-to-user-code boundary

That means not only reflection, but also most Dependency Injection (Spring autowiring, Guice...), anything that runs on annotations (including @Test and JAX-RS), any code auto-generation (e.g. Protobufs, Jooq), most mock libraries (e.g. Mockito) and most configurable logging, especially the logging libraries that try to auto-detect one another.

Of course, some would say those problem are with Corporate Java Culture choosing to use all those things, rather than the Java language itself.

I understand that Java wants to remain conservative with its development roadmap, but the fact that the majority of an ecosystem uses a third-party framework is a good reason incorporate something similar into the language.

That's rather an industry criticism since these problems exist everywhere and are often direct consequence of trade off for looser coupling.

There are also often alternatives - e.g. Dagger for DI and MapStruct for mapping which go the code generation path which allow you to statically inspect the whole code path, you can also always trade the looser coupling for more directed paths e.g. for logging by avoiding the wrapper and using a logging library directly.

No they don't. Java is just not expressive enough, so library/framework authors have to decide between bloat or magic and they often choose magic for better or worse. There are languages that doing better in this regards.

Such as?

I'm not sure this is necessarily a culture, either. Java tends to be picked more for applications with more demanding/richer requirements, and so they need to do a lot. This demand for features drives a demand for richer frameworks. You see this exact thing happening with JS on the client. So to the extent this is a problem, perhaps it is a general software design problem.

I previously asked in another forum about this sort of thing and heard that I should read the docs. I suppose when working at a big company ships internal libraries that expose annotations and use inheritance extensively, but do not have docs, I should just pretend that I am not actually in such a situation, or something.

Intellij can show you which aspects have been applied for e.g. AspectJ or Spring AOP.

I mean if you or your company really insist on writing your own metaprogramming library then yes, IDE can't do much to help you, but that hardly represents industry practice.

You might be thinking this is pretty awful, but hey, software is complicated, you have to understand the code you're working on —- fine. It's reasonable to put this amount of effort into the code you are actually working on. But when you're working on service A and have a question about service B, it's nice to be able to pop over to service B's source code and find the answer without investing a lot of time understanding the technologies underlying it.

This is why "enterprise" Java programmers end up obsessed with anointing "best practice" frameworks. Me relying on a big magical framework for everything I do is only problematic because some other people don't use it. Solution: let's establish my framework as the "de facto standard," and then nobody can complain that it's ridiculous overkill for simple applications. Let's make proficiency with my preferred framework part of the definition of being a professional Java developer, and then nobody can complain about how time-consuming it is to get up to speed with it.

The alternative is to use libraries instead of frameworks, use as little magic as possible, and work in a language that is powerful enough that you can write straightforward code and still say everything you need to say in a reasonable amount of space.

Consider the simple, ubiquitous case of writing a method to implement a POST endpoint in a database-backed CRUD web service. Suppose you need to authorize the request according to some business logic, deserialize the entity body, validate the body according to some business rules, get a database connection, construct a query, run the query, process the query results into a response object, set the status code and headers for the HTTP response, and serialize the response body. Why shouldn't all of this functionality be discoverable in the code via chains of method calls from the method that implements the endpoint? With a concise language and a well-organized codebase, this is entirely possible. Readers of your code can see: here's where to dig in if I want to see how the request is deserialized, here's where to dig in if I want to see how the database query is constructed. If your code becomes exhaustingly verbose when you express it in this straightforward way, then your language is failing you.

As a fan of Scala, I have to admit that Scala introduces a similar difficulty with implicits (and the horrible practice of using wildcard imports to import entire menageries of implicit methods and values, which is epidemic in FP-style Scala.) Implicits are indisputably widely abused, but at least IDEs can show you how implicits are resolved at compile time, and in your own code, you can make implicits reasonably readable without IDE support by declaring them in an enclosing scope with a good name.

[0] I'll make an exception for one style of annotation: annotations that point you directly to the relevant code, like @ExceptionMapper(MyExceptionMapper.class). This is almost always all the information I need, the only exception being if the person who wrote MyExceptionMapper misunderstood some subtlety in how it gets wired in via ExceptionMapper.