My understanding is that refinements are more of a limitation of existing monkeypatching functionality though. Like before, if you needed to monkeypatch something, you had to re-define the method system-wide. This seems like it allows you to have the monkeypatch only apply in the modules that you need it to, and to define it with a special refine keyword that's easy to search for.

Then again, many of the major gems that I've worked with so far define methods in various dynamic ways, making it challenging to figure out what code it's actually running. Hello ActiveRecord?