I have a lot of code like this. The reason I prefer pipelines now is the mental overhead of understanding the intermediate step variables.

Something like

  lines = File.readlines("haystack.txt")
  stripped_lines = lines.map(&:strip)
  needle_lines = stripped_lines.grep(/needle/)
  transformed_lines = needle_lines.map { |line| line.gsub('foo', 'bar') }
  line_counts = transformed_lines.map { |file_path| File.readlines(file_path).count }

is a hell to read and understand later imo. You have to read a lot of intermediate variables that do not matter in anything else in the code after you set it up, but you do not know in advance necessarily which matter and which don't unless you read and understand all of it. Also, it pollutes your workspace with too much stuff, so while this makes it easier to debug, it makes it also harder to read some time after. Moreover becomes even more crumpy if you need to repeat code. You probably need to define a function block then, which moves the crumpiness there.

What I do now is starting defining the transformation in each step as a pure function, and chain them after once everything works, plus enclosing it into an error handler so that I depend on breakpoint debugging less.

There is certainly a trade off, but as a codebase grows larger and deals with more cases where the same code needs to be applied, the benefits of a concise yet expressive notation shows.