I think we're diverging. The mental model of a Rails developers is well formed and if you're a beginner then you can rely on a very strong community for opinions, best practices and conventions to follow. This greatly decreases cognitive load and immensely improves productivity.
When you make a jump to a JS stack (whether client side or server side) you have a lot of options but no best practices or conventions to follow. You have to make a lot of choices which have already been made for you in RoR. Even though SPA frontend dev has settled between React and Vue, you still have to make a lot of decisions. React also bills itself as a view library. You have to make decisions about state management (if needed), routing etc etc. A vast chunk of these decisions are made for you in RoR so that you just work on the app. I think this is what the author was lamenting about.
People REALLY underestimate how much those opinions help when it comes to software development. If you start a project or new feature and your team is going to have lots of opinions on how something should get done. It’s typically easier for people to ingest the idea that something is “best practices” than have to follow whatever someone in the room is saying.
If the platform is too unopinionated you will generally wind up with:
1) A project with many competing ideas (most js projects I see end up like this)
Or
2) A team with some people feeling like they are not heard
Ah, I see your point. I definitely was that beginner that was originally compelled by the ease of Rails. I would watch RailsCasts for fun and be amazed at how much you could do with so little. I thought it was the ultimate developer experience back then.
These days I prefer building something up from microframeworks and I like to take the opposite side of the trade-offs you mention in your comment. There are a lot of aspects of Rails I ended up really disliking over time.
But at the same time, I still find myself thinking back to some of the pleasantries that Rails gives you and wishing I had them in my bespoke applications. Even just things like being able to enumerate your routes from the CLI or seeing your SQL queries and query response time in the terminal during development. If it's something you have to implement yourself, you just tend to not do it at all. And there's a lot a framework can do for you with some opinionatedness.
I think the classic example of this realization is when you deep dive on microframeworks, accumulate them in production, and encounter things like performance issues but realize you don't even have the tools to debug them because you didn't build them.
Rails was somewhat unique at its birth with its opinionated-ness. Outside of that world, in "respectable" programming environments with smart people who were good at algorithms and O(n) notation and all that (which was not me) it was rare that I encountered the kind of insanity that I seem to run into daily with PHP and later JS.
When you make a jump to a JS stack (whether client side or server side) you have a lot of options but no best practices or conventions to follow. You have to make a lot of choices which have already been made for you in RoR. Even though SPA frontend dev has settled between React and Vue, you still have to make a lot of decisions. React also bills itself as a view library. You have to make decisions about state management (if needed), routing etc etc. A vast chunk of these decisions are made for you in RoR so that you just work on the app. I think this is what the author was lamenting about.