For now, what I’ll say is that I’ve seen how Node never really got a rails, and how Rust has a zillion microframeworks but no Rails either, yet. Do we need one? What would it look like? That kind of thing.

> Node never really got a rails

I'm, admittedly, out of the loop when it comes to Node, but I do remember Sails looking promising when it was first announced. I recently suggested it to someone (who uses Node regularly) as a possible solution for a project we're working on and they'd never heard of it. So, between that reaction and the fact that I haven't heard of anyone else using it (or anything similar), I think you're right that a Railsy solution never took off.

Elixir is an interesting counterpoint, though. It seems like Phoenix was released and saw broad adoption very early on.

I'm wondering if this dichotomy is a result of where people are coming to these newer languages from: people writing Elixir probably aren't coming from the FE/JS world, but there's a very good chance people writing Node are. Prior to the somewhat recent proliferation of JS client app frameworks, using a smattering of libraries was a very common approach to solving problems. (It arguably still is, albeit at a different level of abstraction in React/Babel/Webpack land.)

Anyways, I'll be looking forward to reading the post you alluded to above, should it ever come together.