There are always trade-offs. For example, I'd rather read explicit 100 lines of explicit SQL than the 10 liner Active Record abstractions I've had to come back

There are always trade-offs. For example, I'd rather read explicit 100 lines of explicit SQL than the 10 liner Active Record abstractions I've had to come back to on my old Rails projects. It turns out that the 10 liner forces you to keep much more in your head (the whole Active Record abstraction, its idiosyncrasies, its edge cases, its performance profile) than the 100 lines of explicit SQL that let you bootstrap a mental model without having to credentialize in documentation every time you touch the project. I'd also rather read 100 lines of explicit authentication middleware than 10 lines of Devise configuration (a Rails authentication gem) for the same reason. The appeal of "keeping less in my head", as we put it, is one of the main reasons I use small frameworks these days.