Ah, I see your point. I definitely was that beginner that was originally compelled by the ease of Rails. I would watch RailsCasts for fun and be amazed at how much you could do with so little. I thought it was the ultimate developer experience back then.
These days I prefer building something up from microframeworks and I like to take the opposite side of the trade-offs you mention in your comment. There are a lot of aspects of Rails I ended up really disliking over time.
But at the same time, I still find myself thinking back to some of the pleasantries that Rails gives you and wishing I had them in my bespoke applications. Even just things like being able to enumerate your routes from the CLI or seeing your SQL queries and query response time in the terminal during development. If it's something you have to implement yourself, you just tend to not do it at all. And there's a lot a framework can do for you with some opinionatedness.
I think the classic example of this realization is when you deep dive on microframeworks, accumulate them in production, and encounter things like performance issues but realize you don't even have the tools to debug them because you didn't build them.
These days I prefer building something up from microframeworks and I like to take the opposite side of the trade-offs you mention in your comment. There are a lot of aspects of Rails I ended up really disliking over time.
But at the same time, I still find myself thinking back to some of the pleasantries that Rails gives you and wishing I had them in my bespoke applications. Even just things like being able to enumerate your routes from the CLI or seeing your SQL queries and query response time in the terminal during development. If it's something you have to implement yourself, you just tend to not do it at all. And there's a lot a framework can do for you with some opinionatedness.
I think the classic example of this realization is when you deep dive on microframeworks, accumulate them in production, and encounter things like performance issues but realize you don't even have the tools to debug them because you didn't build them.