I can't agree with this more, and with the addition of Turbolinks in recent Rails versions you get the snappiness of a JS front end framework in areas like page

I can't agree with this more, and with the addition of Turbolinks in recent Rails versions you get the snappiness of a JS front end framework in areas like page load. After building a service oriented architecture with React and Rails I truly realized the benefit of a tightly coupled front end / backend for speed of development and deployment. Building bespoke API's for other clients isn't as much of a headache as it's been made out to be.