Using too many gems is an problem for a lot of reasons, though. You are introducing dependencies that you then need to manage and update, they often do more than you need to while being harder to maintain (you might end up with a bunch of forks in your gemfile as things get outdated), they are sometimes invasive and will require big rewrites to switch from.

"it seems people in the community get overly excited about something that saves 5 characters"

I agree (though I'd modify to to say "some people in the community"), I just find that I don't encounter it much when I'm following best practices myself.