[kenhwang]

As a person maintaining multiple Rails codebases approaching a decade in age: RoR just bitrots incredibly fast and its really difficult to catch or update.

With each new version of RoR gems just stop being compatible without replacement, and its a fairly significant effort to migrate everything to the new shiny being introduced. In fairly stable projects where there isn't much feature churn/replacement, you pretty much have entire sections of the codebase that never move past the version they were originally written in. You're constantly maintaining controllers/models written in RoR 3.2/4/4.2/5/5.1 styles since its incredibly difficult finding which features were used, but they still kinda sorta mostly work, until they silently don't.

The difference compared to other frameworks/languages is that Rails is very heavily powered by "magic". Every other tech explicitly configures and calls features being used, but Rails is mostly held together by "convention", but convention evolves. How do you search for things like "the filename of this must match the class name of this" or "the method name must match this database feature". Nevermind the metaprogrammed methods that aren't documented anywhere. The convention evolving as developer preferences changes is generally a good thing and keeps RoR from becoming too dated but it is an expensive maintenance burden.

I quite like Rails and it's still my first choice for personal projects/prototypes. But I'm definitely souring to it for long running professional work.