>The boilerplate often helps when reading unfamiliar code

I don't believe this to be true at all, especially for large code bases. Often the people who support this position have not worked on 100k, 500k, 1m LOC applications I've found.

Boilerplate makes it much more difficult to read and scan large swatehs of code. I think when people say boilerplate 'helps', they often noticing a correlation between the fact that many strongly typed systems happen to have excess boilerplate. I believe it's the typing that helps, not the boilerplate.