My team used Sails for a project about 3 years ago and can confirm that your description fits the framework to a t. We were sold on the premise of a Rails-like experience running on Node, but experienced all the shortcomings you described.

I'd also add that we probably underestimated how much using a less popular framework negatively affected our pace of development. Having a large community helps a lot when you're trying to get junior devs up to speed.