And there was Sails and any number of other attempts at this.

A key strength for Rails is Ruby and a key weakness for any aspiring JS equivalent is JS and the JS ecosystem.

If the Rails team had had to spend time adapting to 6 different alternatives to bundler, rack, and every other library they use it wouldn't be what it is today.

When I last looked at Adonis I was really turned off, but I don't remember why. Looking again, it seems like the templating is a real weakness, but lots of the other things are nice.

I think it’s the closest to rails in philosophy where they aim for sane defaults and one way to do things and also prioritize the dev experience

Oh, and also they provide a repl to your app code and data… that is huge and super hard to find in the js world