I do agree that Rails' asset stuff has been giant pain over the years and has not kept up well. On the other hand, some apps that adopted separate Rails APIs and a separate (for example, React) frontend have been fine. You're right though that their opinion here added more headaches that necessary!

I’d agree in that I never things like Coffeescript but I think that Rails’ frontend solution since 7.0 of Hotwire has been excellent.

Being able to sprinkle just enough JavaScript on server rended HTML works really well. That you can now use it iOS and Android apps too makes it a simpler alternative to React IMHO.

I still much prefer server rendering in a monolith than dealing with GraphQL, backend for frontend and the complexity of micro services and distributed transactions.

Those Django models are a pain to work with if you have to access the database with any other tool that is not the original Django app. The only sane way to design a database managed by Django models and migrations is not using any inheritance between models or you'll end up with a number of tables, each one adding a few fields. Django ORM will join them for you but you are on your own if you ever have to write queries with some other tool.

I never had that experience.

Django does nothing special compared to the way I would design my db tables the completely manual way.

Should not be using inheritance with persistent entities anyway. OOP is not about creating taxonomies.