I believe it's not as big a deal now as it was when it first arrived. At that time the idea of an MVC web framework wasn't new. Django was also in development

I believe it's not as big a deal now as it was when it first arrived. At that time the idea of an MVC web framework wasn't new. Django was also in development and PHP had several crap web frameworks available. So, there weren't very many web frameworks and what was out there wasn't very good. Rails hit the scene and brought the idea of web frameworks to the masses of web developers. Even today after all those years there are PHP frameworks which try to mimic Rails and fall short. The alternatives of today are largely good enough though, especially for more specialized cases. I think you are a step behind. These days you should probably be asking "what's the big deal with Node.js?" ;)