His original article received so much attention because anti-Rails sentiment has reached an all time high and people are looking for confirmation of their feelings against it. But in so doing the same people are misattributing the actual source of their modern application building woes.

It isn't Rails. Its that REST is a terrible and clunky foundation upon which to build your client-server architecture for a complex and changing UI. It might be great for an API, but as we are all apparently rediscovering your UI is a tree extracted from the graph which is the entirety of your data. If your UI components can tell you what data it needs you can build up to root a graph-like query.

I would venture to say Rails suffers because its phenomenal popularity means people reach for it out of familiarity to solve their problems, get decently far and then hit diminishing returns when they find they have to write their app twice, in JS and in Ruby.

Rails provides no way, out of the box, to share a model between client and server. It provides no way for your views to describe their data dependencies and the mutations they allow. Because of this, there is no way to parse an actually expressive query (i.e not query params) and direct that, after security/authentication toward whatever datastore you choose.

It was phenomenally productive 5 years ago when the problems being solved were simpler. At this point I can really only imagine using it to build APIs and that for me is only because I know it so well.