I admit I have no direct experience with it. For my perspective on it, I rely on one of the best developers I've ever worked with - especially when it comes to debugging and deep investigation and she *hates* it. If I had to assume (we don't work together anymore), it's because it did some freaky stuff that made debugging the weird bugs really, really hard.
I have been using Lombok for many years and haven't experienced any issues. Admittedly most of my work involves standard Spring Boot services, so perhaps your friend works with some low level projects that behave differently.
In my experience I don't hesitate to recommend Lombok. It will generate getters/setter/builders/toString in a transparent way, without visible changes in the code. This keeps Java classes much more concise to read.
It also provides withers on records, while waiting for native support (it's coming)
