I have no complaints about Rails. What you said about bloat and cruft is partly true. But there are other things which sometimes substantiate it - boilerplate

I have no complaints about Rails. What you said about bloat and cruft is partly true. But there are other things which sometimes substantiate it - boilerplate and cognitive overhead, for example; sometimes older things have more of these than necessary, and are kept anyway because of their maturity and usefulness (and because a community has already developed which fit its brain to the project and has memorized the quirks already). That is a good reason to keep the old thing, but it does not mean that the older thing is always optimal or even better than a newer thing.