I don't use rails, but I agree with sentiment in general. I first learnt front-end stuff with desktop UI libraries and I hated it. Creating UIs with programming languages sucks. The first time I used the web environment, I really enjoyed it and it was the reason I decided to focus on programming for the web. I was using PHP and server-side rendering, with some javascript to do some interactive things. I liked that the design aspect (html and css) was completely separate from the programming, and that there were no compile steps.

Then eventually the requirement for more application-like experiences led me to adopting client-side frameworks because server-side just wasn't able to do those things very well. I like the idea of a json-based api talking to a client application, but the client-side libraries have bought back all the things I hated about desktop UI programming.

I think html is great and should be left on its own, not combined with the programming language. That is the reason I don't like React. I can't read all of that jsx/pseudo-javascript together. It looks like a mess. Vue is better, but it is just a big hack of stuffing things into html attributes. Both of them also require a compile step if you want to use them to their full potential. So now all the things I hate are back, and I don't like web programming anymore.