I subscribe to this perspective. REST thinks of the web as discrete resources, for which it provides a sufficiently good model. But that model makes it hard to build complex GUIs that deal with a lot of hierarchical data. Such applications can't afford to treat every node as an independent resource sitting across the network. Yet we use the old ways of thinking to build complex new beasts and that unsurprisingly turns out to be a kludge.

Also, if the anti-Rails sentiment has reached an all time high (has it?), it would be because Rails adoption itself has reached an all time high. We do need a web framework that lets us build applications by seamlessly weaving both the front-end and back-end, and unfortunately nothing like that exists. In the absence of such an alternative, Rails remains the web development framework out there with the most bang for the buck. For front-end heavy apps, the easiest approach right now is a `rails new` with Devise and jsroutes, throw in a complex rails-react setup with server-side rendering, write almost all the views in Javascript, and many hundred API endpoints, and after thousands of tests to just validate the inevitable connascence, we have something that works. Something that took us months, which could've been done in VB6 or FoxPro in a week.

GraphQL and Relay promises to fix this, and even if they themselves don't, the conversation has started, and something great will emerge in time.