What's the flaw in the methodology?

It actually makes sense to me. There are a lot of shops with legacy Rails apps, and they'll use Rails for new code too, because it's worked well and they don't need to do the shiny and new.

Like us. We started a newish project on Rails and couldn't be happier. 90% of the app's job is to do CRUD. Wouldn't want to use any other framework for that job.

Exactly. It's really hard to beat Rails for CRUD apps, and CRUD is so many situations.

The truth is that it is a declining platform. I guess that is why the author uses the words "still huge" and succumbs to the strange urge to compare it to the .NET and Java-platforms which are obviously much larger in terms of jobs and use.

As a Rails dev, I personally prefer "matured" vs "declining" – and to be fair, "mature" it's also one of those words that management would like to see associated with our choice of technology stack, too.

Some things get better with age. There's an advantage too, not being on the brand-spanking latest version of something – you get to let everyone else filter out the crap before it winds up in your production environments.

A few examples from recent Rails releases,

(1) Turbolinks is one thing that was widely regarded as absolute crap when it was released, but now I think it's a pretty non-controversial way for Rails developers to give their users a single-page experience without necessarily diving headfirst into JavaScript.

(2) If you rebuilt all of your Rails 5 apps to use the shiny new Encrypted Secrets in 5.1, ... surprise! 5.2 deprecates secrets in favor of the newer Encrypted Credentials feature.

I'm not saying there aren't good ideas in newer frameworks, but how many mature frameworks are still in active development? (Make a list) ... and how many of those would you actually like to use?

Though they may be more popular, I'm personally not seeing lots of people rallying behind Java and .NET, or making outrageous claims like that those platforms prioritize developer happiness. Rails developers like using rails.

Declining was refering to the number of users, jobs, new projects and so on.

I agree that Rails today is a mature platform and very good at what it does: server-side rendered web applications with a relational database backend.

There's increasingly nice out-of-the-box support in Rails for React. Last time I set it up it wasn't trivial, but it wasn't a bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Rails 6 had it extremely baked in.

That's fair! And I'll concede that I actually don't know anyone outside of my own working group (we had standardized on Rails), and the people that I actually met at the annual Rails Conference, who are still talking about using Rails.

Otherwise, the most prolific programmers I know personally that used Rails, have all moved onto other platforms at new jobs or for their new development projects. Mostly Go, modern JS frameworks (many of them), Python, and Kotlin.