First thing I do when creating a new rails project is remove Turbolinks. It subtly breaks other gems all over the place in difficult to discover ways.
Turbolinks messes A LOT with conventional design. Unless you really want the "one page" approach, or have a small, simple app or site -- or even if you just want to design a site using normal CSS conventions -- then Turbolinks gets disabled right away.
Fortunately, we can still do that. I can legitimately question the decisions made regarding default settings, but at least those settings can be changed.