[mrgordon]

Maybe this says something about the article writers?

Most Rails applications I see have minimal monkeypatching and I can’t remember the last time I had to debug an issue related to one. On the contrary, monkeypatching is most often used to fix issues in libraries that would otherwise require forking or pushing changes upstream to the project to fix. For example, Rails 3.2 is missing a few time duration methods from Rails 4 which Ruby 2.4 relies on so you need to add those via monkeypatch to run Ruby 2.4 with the legacy Rails version if you can’t upgrade everything at once.