This is still sort of the mainstream view on this, but I think a return to monolithic Rails-style frameworks is coming. Microframeworks and especially Node got

This is still sort of the mainstream view on this, but I think a return to monolithic Rails-style frameworks is coming. Microframeworks and especially Node got a lot of popularity, and then all the microservice stuff started to get popular and overused as well, and ultimately this is leading a lot of people to do unnecessary work and ending up with a custom solution that isn't as good as what they could've had off the shelf. As for modern front end trends, Rails is getting better in this regard, especially since 5.0. Most people typically have a separate frontend and backend codebase anyways, so in that sense Rails API is all you need, and that's baked in now.