Hmm ... to each their own I guess. But while developing backends with Kotlin I attempted to ditch all annotation/reflection/code-generation based libraries for a while, opting for functional libraries like ktor, exposed etc. But the end result always ended up being a lot more verbose and repetitive.

I now feel that some form of behind-the-scene code-generation or reflection support is generally good to have so that the bulk of the application stays focussed on application logic instead of various dto conversions, mappings, transformations etc. I don't shy away from Quarkus, MapStruct etc. now a days and I think my code is easier to follow because of what they enable.

Typescript is a bit of an exception here because the type system is quite powerful with various type transformation capabilities but Gleam's type system also appears to be quite minimal.