> from there it's just regular rails
That's the problem. Examples like this focus on the first few minutes of development. Not the subsequent years of maintenance.
You're gonna have to pry the Rails from my cold dead fingers if you want me to maintain a web app's database abstraction layer long-term. No other tool works half as well as ActiveRecord. You could maybe convince me to try out https://rom-rb.org/ but only on a brand new project and only if Rails isn't appropriate.
If it's a project that wasn't built with Rails, I'm going to want https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel if ActiveRecord is too much trouble to introduce.
>Not the subsequent years of maintenance.
I'd much rather maintain this example than a code base replicating the same behavior without an ORM.
adding an index:
add_index :tags, :name
change_column :tags, :name, :string, null: false
validates :name, presence: true # for proper validations
Fair enough. I’ll concede that wasn’t a fair comparison to the OP. My point remains that examples focusing on the initial setup are uninteresting (to me) because that’s not where the bulk of the work is.