Similar backstory. Back when I used Rails as a young dev I remember loving it but thought it all felt a bit parochial somehow, like they didn’t really get where the web was going. Now I realise they were just not interested in hype and other bullshit, they never get sucked into the latest scalability trends like I always did, they never cared about being first and trendy, and that’s why Rails is still there and still effective. My theory is most other frameworks are unwittingly designed around avoidance - people trying to solve painful things “once and for all” so they don’t ever have to worry about them again, while Rails is more about embracing the uncertainty of the future and being smart and measured about it, like: “Yeah you might need to rethink this part of your setup in a few years to scale it, but there’ll be ways and it’ll be fun; don’t stress about it now, focus on what matters.” And as a more mature engineer I now realise they were so very right with this attitude, and that it results in much better stability and adaptability to new requirements over time. To think, the way I used to think it was a bad reflection on the ecosystem to see popular gems that haven’t been updated for months, while it was a good sign that Node packages were being updated every day… Lol. I think I need to make the jump back to being a Rails dev.