Sure, in retrospect you could create the same thing. It's just various text processing at the end of the day. What I'm claiming is that their choice of Rails led to certain choices which were really transparent throughout the product and are still there. It would've grown to be something totally different on another technology, so I don't think it's fair to just look at cost and performance. They did many things "the Rails way"

Java is very verbouse, that's why I picked on it. You would simply have to write a lot more LOC, which would take more time, be more code to maintain, and so on. It's not a matter of static vs. dynamic, Haskell for instance is probably at least as succinct as Ruby (though I doubt you'll find a Hasekll web framework as productive as Rails).

Rails is optimized for small teams to ship code to multiple platforms. When I visit indiehackers and see people posting about their struggles creating a page to update user profiles and the associated back end code - it's not hard to see why it's more productive. There is very little in the way of boilerplate or BS.

There is nothing out there that has anything close to the productivity of rails. Not that there can't be; it's just not a mindset/approach the industry has embraced.