IMO it's because they mostly just don't think about the chaos they're doing. You encounter a function call that ends in a hash. Does the function being called use that as a hash or does it explode the hash to populate some extra trailing parameters? You have no way to know without going and looking. To me that's super dumb. To them it's just another day in unexpected behavior land.
Pretty hard to grow and learn new concepts if you immediately label anything you don’t understand yet as “super dumb”
Honestly, this is a feature. If the difference matters, then you are likely doing something wrong.
I assume this is referring to passing hashes in as parameters to methods. Ruby 3 made this more explicit; you must use ** to convert a hash into positional arguments and you must use {} around your key/values if the first argument is a hash.
Also Rubyists as a whole tend to update to the newest Ruby fairly fast. There are of course places that don't upgrade quickly (especially legacy systems that are barely touched), but most places with living code bases seems to be very quick when it comes to updating nowadays.