[jemmyw]

I've been on a similar journey. I was deep into rails early in my career. Then I moved on, especially liking typescript. I thought I wouldn't go back. But you don't always get the choice, a great job came up and it was a rails app. I found joy in it again - and I'm still there nearly 10 years on. Ruby feels like how OOP should be, it's so very easy to implement patterns that other languages make verbose and horrible. I'm guilty of a lot of metaprogramming, hope you forgive me, I am over 40. I think it can be an undervalued super power of the language: something isn't working or you need deeper insight, just break into the innards of any library you're using and insert logging and/or your own code.

Anyway, that said, for new personal projects I like typescript and rust. But recently I needed to stick an admin interface on such a project and rails shines there, you can get something good and secure stood up with less code and faff than anything else. In today's world of LLMs that is helpful too, rails is concise and old and has lots of open source projects to pull from, so AI breezes through it.