JavaScript (even with TypeScript) and frontend frameworks are…quite a journey by comparison.
I would argue that the performance hit isn't from ruby or the framework, but from people abusing the database with lazy loading in active record. Force people to fetch all the data they need in one query (similar to Ecto), and your performance will improve. There's some config value that disables lazy loading too
That said, it is also quite slow when you actually do need requests per second or rows per second, but the usual thing is to throw more machines at it,reduce the amount of magic in the hot path (like activerecord-import for bulk data if that's still maintained,) or use something else for the hot path.
I see so much focus on this on web frameworks generally and it strikes me as almost always the wrong thing to optimise for.
I don’t know rails, the last time i tried it was circa 2007 and yet I’d confidently adopt it given the right situation.
If i had a choice between shipping features 2% sooner or saving $10k / year on server costs, I’d almost always choose sooner. Let’s be honest, a rails dev team is moving more than 2% faster than a java/c# web dev team.
If i have 5 devs and they’re all 2% more productive, that could be around $10k of free developer output but it’s more than that, developer productivity compounds. 75% off my server costs doesn’t.