apparently, my bad. my earlier reading of rails from years ago was that this was runtime inflection, not at generation time.

it still, imo, adds some cognitive overhead, and other orms I've used (grails/gorm, for example), don't try to pluralize. you can pluralize by hand if you want to, but the default is just to name a table whatever the class name is.

It does bring cognitive overhead, when it's not explicit

But you’re writing an ActiveRecord migration. It’s explicit in the same way that echoing a string out is ‘puts’ instead of ‘print’ because this is Ruby and not Python.

what if you're on a team where your responsibilities are divided and you only touch ActiveRecord sporadically?

What does ActiveRecord consider the plural of "fish"?

You can change the inflections if you need to do so. ActiveRecord by default considers fish to be an uncountable noun, so the plural would be "fish".