It's still productive. It's just not "cool" anymore. Further, some of the choices DHH and company have made have been the opposite of other communities: for exa

It's still productive. It's just not "cool" anymore. Further, some of the choices DHH and company have made have been the opposite of other communities: for example, rails omakase still doesn't default to a single page app, though it is supported. If I started a project today that was slated to be on the web, I'd pick one of two languages. If the least interesting part of the work was the code, and I didn't see significant places where I was worried about future performance in the business logic layer, I'd pick rails. (This is 95% of cases.) If I thought this system would have performance-critical components or would need to scale to thousands of programmers of varying skill, I'd pick java. (I have a soft spot in my heart for clojure and elixir, and there are some edge cases where I might pick those, and a java ecosystem would allow for clojure interop. For example, some problems lend themselves to functional thinking. And, of course, there are some problems where another language shines - I could see defaulting to another tool if necessary.)