I came at this from the opposite direction in that I had zero coding experience and started learning ~7-8 months ago. I picked Rails specifically because everyone kept saying "it's dead" but every actual builder I talked to said "it just works." They were right. Rails gave me sensible defaults for everything I needed; auth, background jobs, file storage, payments...without me having to evaluate 30 competing npm packages for each concern. I shipped a production app with real Stripe payments as a solo dev with no CS degree. I genuinely don't understand how someone starting from scratch today navigates the JS ecosystem without losing months just to decision fatigue on tooling.