My experiences are pretty much the same, the important distinction was when we added support for mobile apps, the API design problems had to be solved anyway, a

My experiences are pretty much the same, the important distinction was when we added support for mobile apps, the API design problems had to be solved anyway, and significant differences between the interfaces for both mobile and web made it a pain to work with, we shifted to full API driven back-end and ember front-end and I cannot be happier. I think the author is missing the fact that it it hard to justify Rails only approach if you have to support mobile interfaces and HTML is not only medium you are working with.