I'm seeing the very same. Because I had some Rails experience in the 2.3/3.x days, I get recruiters constantly bombarding me to come work with their Rails monoliths. The few companies that I've actually spoken with are all trying to get AWAY from those massive Rails apps. They're moving to Elixir "microservices".
My read on this is that many of these apps were begun as PoCs/MVPs and as the original engineers have tried to scale, they've lost interest. So we have a large amount of 5-10 year old code bases that are looking for maintainers. One friend in particular contacted me and asked if I knew anyone who'd be willing to contract with his firm to upgrade a Rails 5.x app. This tells me, they had no one on staff that could do so.
So yes, the need for Rails devs is large. The popularity of it? At least in my area... not so much.
All those successful efforts with Rails over the last ten years -- many are moving on to other tech, many are just getting bigger with Rails.
I thought I had moved away from Rails into Go (I find the two very complementary), but I got pulled back into some solid, meaningful projects using Rails.
People complain about the tech, but I would rather have a bad tech stack on a product/app with a chance than the perfect tech stack making the next twitter for dogs.
My read on this is that many of these apps were begun as PoCs/MVPs and as the original engineers have tried to scale, they've lost interest. So we have a large amount of 5-10 year old code bases that are looking for maintainers. One friend in particular contacted me and asked if I knew anyone who'd be willing to contract with his firm to upgrade a Rails 5.x app. This tells me, they had no one on staff that could do so.
So yes, the need for Rails devs is large. The popularity of it? At least in my area... not so much.