And I'm not a Rails person, so it wasn't flattery.
Maybe in USA. In Europe, Rails has been far less popular. Now I imagine expensive candidates means the ability to work on decade old Rails codebases from previous versions, which means with a lot of Rails experience.
Half the companies using it are 1-2 years old according to him. Lots of 10 person startup teams just fresh off a raise.
As things have played out, PHP has done pretty well at modernizing (I know some would debate that, but that's a different thread), and Rails has faded a bit into the background -- although now I joke that because Rails is well out of its fad phase, it can get down to the real work.
I do wonder whether Rails has been kind of a mixed blessing for Ruby all in all, though. I think Ruby is, in itself, a great alternative to Python or Perl, and it's the language I reach for first when I'm writing short utility scripts -- but since Rails exploded in popularity before Ruby itself did, a lot of Ruby programmers really only know Ruby to the degree they know Rails.
This so bad that frequently I see “Ruby on Rails” in lists of programming languages aside “PHP”, or “Elixir”, or “JavaScript”.
(When I was most in to Ruby – but not so much Rails, even then – there was actually a palpable divide in the community between the Rails-only community and the broader Ruby community, some of which was Rails-inclusive.)
I have friends everywhere from FAANGMULA to Deloitte to 100 person tech startups (and I am at one myself)to banks. We have a group chat of classmates.
No attempts to stem the wave of resignations anywhere as far as we can tell.
The Ruby and Rails ecosystem has Stripe, Shopify, GitHub actively pushing new things all the time, DHH and co working on version 7 right now, etc...