Apache Struts is pretty much dead as in not many are using it.

Not sure if it fits your definition, but how about Flash/ActionScript/Adobe AIR?

I think JS can quite nice but it requires some rather tight control over how it’s used in your teams. If you don’t do that then it’ll be a nightmare, but that freedom doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t make it a fairly decent experience. I do think React has become a terrible framework to work on after their love relationship with Next which is… well just horrendously bad, especially if you don’t buy into the whole Vercel thing, but using that is still a choice you don’t have to make.

With that said there is no doubt that things like RoR, various Python frameworks, Go + templates or Laravel are massive improvements. Especially for internal apps where things like HTMX coupled with templates lets you be extremely productive without scaring middle-managers who are afraid of page reloads. I know something like RoR, Laravel or Django aren’t hyped in tech communities, but in the “real” world where being productive matters a lot more than the underlying tech, which is where (as you point out) they continue to deliver great value. Meaning that they’ve got massive staying power. Being “old” typically also means they undergo much more reasonable changes than your average JavaScript framework where you sometimes might as well pick a completely different one on major updates.

I agree, I’ve been working with other languages and frameworks and in my opinion nothing comes close. People often mention Laravel as comparable or even superior, but having worked with it for a year I struggled a lot with how messed up PHP is (even with all the improvements done over the years.)

JavaScript doesn’t have anything comparable either, although I haven’t worked much with NextJS with server-side rendering, maybe this brings it closer to DX of Rails

Elixir and Phoenix/Ecto is much superior to Rails IMO.

My main gripe with Rails are conventions everywhere which aren't documented clearly. You just have to know them/learn them over time/from guides. It makes refactoring really hard, too.

Phoenix, and it's not even close. I'm never going back to Rails.

Rails offers a choice of: webpack, esbuild, rollup, bun (since Rails v.7.1 I believe) and importmaps (default).

At least 5 built-in ways of doing JavaScript. And there are many more outside that, of course. None of these is Rails' "fault". That's the world of JavaScript, how it is.

As for the assets - Sprockets or Propshaft. The latter will replace Sprockets in new Rails versions.

I develop a lot in Rails mostly as a single developer and and it's totally ok. With CSS and JS you can pick the approach you like and just stick with it. Importmaps(which i don't prefer myself btw) are the current default but it's very easy to use the older Asset Pipeline without any problems.

And frankly importmaps or the other possible aproaches are not so hard to understand. Any serious developer should be able to learn that. It's also not a Rails thing, it's just web

the path forward is clear, and it’s no build/importmap based. i just overhauled a 15 year old rails project from rails 4 to 7, and ruby 2 to 3. ripping out webpack reduced deploy time by 90%

the complexity of the app is greatly reduced as a result.

That's not my experience yet. I don't need to fight against a prompt eater that generates tremendous amount of nonsense that it will pretend to apologies about when you start to point every flows present in its output, having to deal with even more large amount of thoughtless suggestions as a result.

When you use a scaffolding script from Rails or similar, the result is always consistent, and errors will most likely be coming from the command used than from the fundamental way the script works.