Because Rails is a huge mega framework that tries to do everything in a very opinionated way. We need guys love to compose bigger things out of small things. :-)

They do have Sails but it's nowhere as good as as RoR. At least prefer something fast like Fastify or Koa if using Node.js.

Doesn't this kinda prove the point that Node.js is only more performant when used with micro-frameworks like Express? That Sails failed to match Rails should tell you something. A fair comparison with Express would be something like Grape or Rhoda. Node.js itself should be compared with Rack which is pretty fast.

The fact that Sails never caught on to match or exceed Rails usage doesn't mean the main problem was primarily performance. Rails, for one, has a huge incumbency advantage (2004). Second, Rails is just easier than throwing together a pile of NPM modules. Imagine if you had 0 knowledge of the NPM ecosystem. It'd be quite a lot of decision making to evaluate a basket of modules that could emulate all of what rails provides.

Thworing together a pile of third party NPM modules is a bad decision anyway. This is precisely why we picked Mojolicious to use as a Perl web framework: minimal dependencies, minimal breakage, reimplements some functionality. It turned out to be a good decision as it's also actively maintained compared to the others.

Sails was not in a good way when I used it...

So on one hand, adonisjs, feathers, etc., but a lot of nodejs users consider express+npm to be their "rails".