Not 200,000. A single process wasn't able to handle 20.
You'll be hard pressed intentionally writing code that performs that slowly in a framework in another language.
Ruby by default has an incredibly long list of "you can but you shouldn't" and things you need to be aware of, especially around concurrency.
Other languages are mostly fast by default. When you follow some nodejs/express/whatever introduction tutorial and implement your first application in the most naive way possible, you'll end up with something that will easily scale to hundreds if not thousands of users out of the box.
Do the same with ruby (or even with some python frameworks, to be fair), and stuff can break at less than a hundred users.
And that's why yes, you can blame that on ruby. Or at least ruby how it is commonly taught.