Rails is amazing compared to NextJS or Express + React for me. Getting a lot more done. Writing a lot less code. The Rails ecosystem is great for doing a SaaS + modern content site/app.
I was away from Rails with full stack JS since before the pandemic.
I don’t think that much has changed with Rails since like Rails 4 or 5.
Maybe this is a recency bias, but for my own work or any work where I can dictate or influence the tech stack of a modern web app, I’m sticking with Rails/Laravel and React or Svelte when modern frontend/views are needed.
I don’t think Rails or Laravel should even focus on views that much any more in Ruby/PHP.
I get the best of all worlds now and I don’t hate JS any more. In fact I have sort of fallen in love with React as well now that it is only doing what it should do and I want to learn Svelte.
... even ten years ago, it felt pretty dated. Has Rails grown some framework-supported tooling for web apps yet, or is that the utility we're talking about?
> Then again reinventing wheels is the JS way of life.
There's some truth to this. The underlying notion is "how much computation do you do server-side vs. client-side," and because browsers don't run every possible language, the shortest path to client-side behavior is in JS. So there's a lot of wheel-reinvention in that sense.
(I do see the notion of writing the code once to run in either context wax and wane. boardgame.io is a JavaScript framework for writing turn-based stateful games; it uses a specific authorship pattern to run the core behavior library both server and client-side, so clients can responsively predict what will happen while the server steps through the rules and updates the game state).