FYI, there is a significant contingent of the Ruby community that doesn’t use rspec (for exactly the reasons you mention). Heck, the test suites for Rails and Ruby itself use minitest, not rspec. It’s hard to notice this, though, because the rspec people have a vastly larger written output.

It sounds like most of your criticisms are criticisms of dynamic languages. Ruby gives you a million and one footguns, but they are beautiful and elegant footguns.