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What's an example of a framework that meets this bar? In my experience, the messiness is generally a function of scope, team size and technical ability. Some languages / frameworks give you better or worse tools for managing that scalability, but context matters (right tool for the job) and none can guarantee a good result if the team is weak. What really matters is the technical leadership, who must have both the experience, and sufficient influence, to avoid going down a path of crippling technical debt that eventually strangles the system.

As far as Rails goes, for all it's shortcomings, people forget what web development was like in 2003. The dominant paradigms were overwrought XML-powered J2EE with incredibly low power-to-weight ratio for web development, or unstructured PHP wild west stuff. These days every language has a framework that was heavily influenced (directly or indirectly) by Rails. Sure I wouldn't use Rails everywhere (1000+ engineer team: java, lots of concurrency: elixir/erlang, lower-level large systems: go/rust, etc), but it still has a great sweet spot from the prototype to moderate sized web app / API. Things that become weaknesses as you scale (eg. ActiveRecord pattern) are based on contextual tradeoffs that need to be made thoughtfully versus declaring them table stakes for all web frameworks.