Instead of adding exactly what gems you need, rails forces you to jump through hoops to removed bloatware (ActiveText, ActiveCable, ActiveStorage).
Moving off of the rails asset pipeline to webpack was silly. If you're running a SPA, you should have a fully separated web-app and tooling stream instead of trying to merge your backend and frontends. For server side rendering, asset pipeline was good enough IMHO.
ActiveText doesn't even support CRDTs. Otherwise it doesn't really add much value to advanced text editor eco-systems.
The change logs are either adding bloatware that only Basecamp asked for, bug fixes, or security patches.
> And i think mentioning ML points in a direction that you don't know much about normal web development since for 99% of web things you don't need any ML at all.
This sounds like someone that has either only worked with webapps with very few users and not at big tech scale. You can get away with not using ML in b2b products with 5 customers, but at some point you will need to add ML to scale.
ActiveStorage is great addition - storing files on AWS now takes 30 minutes at most to setup. You don't need to use external gems for the same functionality now. Labeling it as a regression is nonsense as Rails before didn't have the functionality at all.
Ruby also evolved a ton since Rails 4. Just look at changelogs or something.
Scaling Rails is same as scaling any other stack. If your software grows it will run into bottlenecks no matter what you use. Rails is no harder to scale than anything else. It mostly is about people, not stacks anyways.
And i think mentioning ML points in a direction that you don't know much about normal web development since for 99% of web things you don't need any ML at all.