Does it address config drift in production where users make changes that aren't reflected in the versioned codebase? The question is not intended as a retort, I'm interested in the answer.

The prejudices I have against Drupal are the result of my experience of it starting as far back as version 4. I don't believe they are unfounded.

You're not wrong at all.

I'm currently investing moving our sites (a network with 1M+ visits/and 12M+ pageviews) from Drupal 6 to Rails.

We have a large amount of custom code (I've written 20+ modules for this platform), and yet we've gotten to a point where we really want Drupal (and PHP) out of our lives, because it isn't worth the headaches anymore.