No. I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Ruby isn't popular itself (with or without Rails). It's barely more popular than Fortran, according to TIOBE[1]. It cracks the top 10 according to Redmonk, but has been generally declining since 2012[2].
Somewhat shockingly, it's even less widely used than Rust according to Stack Overflow[3].
They also found Ruby has a 53% loved vs. 47% dreaded score, compared to Python's 68% and 32%. It's especially surprising that Stack Overflow's respondents like Ruby less than JavaScript and SQL, the two most frustrating languages I have ever been forced to work with myself.
> Python and Ruby occupy the same space and use cases
This is absolutely untrue. I personally loathe Python, but it is perhaps the most useful language you can learn right now, and it barely overlaps with Ruby.
It's huge in statistics/data science and machine learning. It's not the most common web backend, but it still has a fairly large ecosystem for the web. It's rapidly rising in popularity, too.
1. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
2. https://redmonk.com/kfitzpatrick/2021/03/02/redmonk-top-20-l...
3. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...