This is something I've thought a lot about over the years too. Runtime performance is great and very much welcome if you can get it for free but for a ton of w

This is something I've thought a lot about over the years too. Runtime performance is great and very much welcome if you can get it for free but for a ton of web apps it's not a major selling point on its own. If I can write 30-100% less code and be able to Google almost every single problem I encounter and find tons of high quality blog posts, documentation and videos along with having decently maintained third party libraries for common features then this is going to win every time in my book against something that doesn't have this. It doesn't matter if your web app uses 100mb of memory instead of 1gb or can serve 300 requests per second instead of 30. Most apps never come remotely near the point where this level of performance matters and Rails makes it easy enough to cache things where you can get your p95+ responses responding in 50-100ms or less without much effort. Basically Rails sets you up where a solo dev or small team can run an entire SAAS app on a single $20-40 / month server and have tens of thousands of paying customers without really having to think much about performance. Combine this with Hotwire and you can build really nice feeling sites very quickly if you're the type of person who doesn't want to build APIs + JS front-ends. On the other side of the spectrum with Shopify, GitHub and Basecamp you have engineers running Rails at massive scale making the framework better for everyone (themselves included). It's a self-fulfilling prophecy and win / win scenario because the more people that use it contribute back to the project (patches, community related things, etc.). At this point the only things that matter are fast how you can build your app and how happy are you building / maintaining it. As Ruby, Rails and compute resources get faster then frameworks who focus mainly on performance become less appealing over time for a huge class of web apps because once you reach "good enough" performance it's all about the community and mass adoption. It's like a company who pops up and tries to copy another company but adds 1 small feature to differentiate themselves. As soon as the company you copied decides to add that feature you're going to be climbing way up hill to barely survive.