After some testing I was able to get the sample project working. It was definitely an issue with the Lombok version, not with Netbeans. 1.16.x was being pulled in by the parent POM - but 1.18.x works as expected. So I have a workaround (add direct dependency) until my company upgrades the parent POM.
For reference it produced the following exception in the logs: [exec] INFO [com.sun.tools.javac.processing.JavacProcessingEnvironment]: Annotation processing error: [exec] java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.sun.tools.javac.code.TypeTags Thanks for your help Gj. dani