I've used Rails for small-medium sized projects and overall have a good impression of it (I'd even argue it did a lot to drive web development forwards) and I know there are still orgs out there using it regularly, but is Rails honestly still being used to build large scale apps (excepting the ones that have already been around forever like Github)?

Every org I've worked at since the last Rails project I worked on around 2014 has built JavaScript heavy thick clients on top of API's. That's not really where Rails shines, and I've not seen it around at all for newer projects since roughly that time.

It's anecdotal, but it's my experience that the industry has largely settled on the SPA + API's architecture, and the technologies every org I've worked at use to build those SPA's are either React, Angular, Vue, or very occasionally for niche cases their own JavaScript framework.

I understand that some people on Hacker News still dislike the complexity of modern front ends, and I get it, I really do. But I haven't seen any real alternatives that have been seriously used in anger to build an actual commercial application since React, Angular (and Vue) took over.

I wouldn't categorize Hotwire as a well-established technology simply because it's included with Rails. Its prominence isn't solidified even with support from notable figures – as all tech trends have their advocates. In my perspective, it's somewhat analogous to htmx: The cool kids are using it for smaller, manageable use cases, but it's far apart, like magnitudes, from the adoption React has.