Most Java code actually does rely on it, but behind the scenes. So you could go years between writing any reflection code yourself, but libraries and frameworks

Most Java code actually does rely on it, but behind the scenes. So you could go years between writing any reflection code yourself, but libraries and frameworks use it to dynamically search for known stuff in the classpath and change behavior if it finds other class X, or use it to serialize to and from various formats and java objects, do stuff based on annotations etc.