[hakunin]

This is anecdotal, but one thing I do when comparing languages and frameworks, is browse the most popular libraries on GitHub from that ecosystem, and see how much maintenance they're getting. I usually use the contributors graph, as well as review how/when issues are handled. Ruby projects seem to have the most contributors maintaining the "deepest" libraries of any ecosystem I've seen, consistently, for the longest time. In other ecosystems I keep seeing one guy trickle-maintain some massively popular (based on stars) project that fizzled out over time. You could argue that some of that is due to "completeness", but I keep seeing evidence to the contrary: still many unsolved issues, but the initial activity spike subsides down to a trickle. To me that's what represents the health of an ecosystem: not how many new projects are created, but rather how well supported existing projects are.

[vindin]

I've noticed the exact same thing. Every tablestakes component has a gold standard library (sidekiq, puma, devise, rake, vcr, and so many others) and all seem to have been updated within the last week. The community might be small and have a dull outward appearance, but anyone who works with Ruby knows that the ecosystem has been blooming with life for 2 decades.