> Rails is not dead; It's better than ever. Try using it to make something new this year.
Apparently that's one of the few things you can do well with a rails app. As evidenced by all of the rails apps stuck behind 3+ major versions because refactoring or upgrading without breaking everything is damn near impossible.
In the past year I've worked with a couple of codebases upgrading multiple versions, and it wasn't that much work. The upgrade generator lets you step through each changing file, view diffs, allowing you to edit files manually if you edited the core config files extensively. In general, the more you edit those core config files instead of extending via initializers, the more painful it is, so perhaps you've worked with codebases where there wasn't a lot of discipline.
I rant about rails, often, but this is just a full on garbage comment. Your evidence is "all of the rails apps stuck"... where exactly? like... you have a listing of these? Or are you just making things up?
I've done a ton of rails upgrades in my career, they've all been easier than any other framework (except the current batch of js/ts frameworks that use codemods to update the majority of breaking changes).
DHH has been making some pretty wild changes with non-Ruby parts of Rails, but Rails 8 still fully supports sprockets, their asset pipeline introduced 15 years ago. All of the other asset pipeline alternatives are still supported, even though Rails introduced "Propshaft" as a replacement.
The only thing we've had trouble with upgrading has been when Rails added full support for read/write shards... it wasn't fully compatible with Aurora Serverless at launch, but we had wanted to migrate off that anyways.
So.... try adding some signal instead of just noise. Cite specific issues, rather than just try to ride a bandwagon.
I've had a much better time moving Rails code bases through version and library changes than JS, PHP, or Python ones. But I think that might be nothing more than Rails code bases being more likely to have some sort of test suite that covers some meaningful application surface.
I manage a Redmine installation (a Rails-based issue tracking package that’s amazing). I’ve been upgrading it every year for close to ten years now and every upgrade has gone smoothly even though I know almost nothing about Rails or Ruby.
I upgraded a large Rails app from 3 to 5 using a flag ENV["RAILS_NEXT"] everywhere in my code and a few monkey-patch shims here and there (easy to do in Ruby.) We ran with the ENV var set in staging for 3 months before flipping it in prod, it was fine. Upgrades since version 5 have been much easier.
Apparently that's one of the few things you can do well with a rails app. As evidenced by all of the rails apps stuck behind 3+ major versions because refactoring or upgrading without breaking everything is damn near impossible.