I had this exact realization getting ramped up in a large rails codebase: ruby is optimized for experience of the code author, while most of the things people miss from it (explicit imports, static types) help with code maintenance and codebase scalability.

The small/large project distinction makes sense to me. I think there’s a clear point in project size where the joy of writing code has to be deprioritized behind maintainability and simplicity, even if it becomes less fun to write code that way.