Yes calling Rails magical is a bit lazy imo. There is no magic and everything is documented to the point I would say it's actually quite a beginner friendly framework. You can say you disagree with some of the Rails APIs/conventions but that's very different than "magic". I think a lot of the complainers are people who just don't want to bother with Rails, they are not making the minimal effort of reading most of the docs. Maybe there was one Rails legacy project on their job that was a mess and interfered with their efforts to learn Node/React/Cool new stack. If that's your mindset then yes Rails is very "magical".