That's a matter of developer discipline and foresight. I've be managing a Rails project since late 2011 (that's my longest run so far), usually adding a few features per year and fixing bugs, mostly alone or with another developer. If I put too much magic into the code I'd spend much of my time figuring out what I did months ago. Instead I can usually read my code from 2011 / 2012 and understand what it does. The puzzling exceptions are not so exceptional: I'm having the same experiences with the other code bases I'm working on (Python, Elixir.)

So in doubt no metaprogramming. Example: I never wrote a macro in a real world Elixir project.

I can't say anything about the number of featurea, that's entirely business driven, but of course you shouldn't be writing macros in Elixir on a standard application.

But it's not abnormal for a rails codebase to have a Concern (rails module) that provides a class method that does something, specific to the application. Which is equivalent to a macro.

I have seen a couple of Rails codebases and "metaprogramming keeps being used extensively instead of being limited" was not the problem in any of them. Instead it was mostly picking bad dependencies, rushing to delivery, layering complex features on top of one another. The code was maintainable, it is the business logic (and the decisions made hastily) what made it unmaintainable.

> Unfortunately to reach this disillusioned state you need to hit some really hard walls

I have seen quite a few Rails apps, some pretty old, and these were not the hard walls which were hit. One way of not hitting those specific walls (which are pretty soft IMO) is hiring decent people, decently compensated. And empowering them to make decisions.

Notice that we might have a different definition of metaprogramming. Including a module, to me, is part of metaprogramming.

A lot of codebases do that, and they create chain of undeclared dependencies between multiple modules being included that make impossible to determine the requirements to use such module in the first place.

The development tend also to slow down to a cripple, as well as being overstaffed to compensate.