To each their own. I don’t fanboy frameworks, they all have their pros and cons. What you specialize in for a personal professional career is different from what you may choose for a free software project though. Plus, I’d argue there’s definitely downsides to the JS ecosystem as well but also frameworks you know should not dictate your career prospects. I get this all the time in interviews and career development talks. If you consider yourself a web developer getting up to speed with a new stack or framework shouldn’t be an insurmountable task. The nature of web development is that it’s constantly changing. Feeling stuck with Rails vs. Django vs. React or whatever else means your skills are not keeping up with the market; it’s not a fault of the framework. The only constant in this line of work is change.

That said, Rails isn’t going anywhere. JS frameworks are the hot thing (for whatever reason, I despise them for all sorts of reasons, but that’s not the point) for many new companies/projects, but there are very large companies whose products are built on Rails: Shopify, GitHub, GitLab, Zendesk, etc.

There’s too much radical changes. First from sprockets to webpacker and then import-maps and propshaft. And then the in-built Hotwire is so hard to grasp.

Would this not be viewed as adapting and keeping up with the trends? Webpack is terrible, but that’s what the JS world went with so Rails adopted it. Now there’s ESbuild, import-maps, and Hotwire. Rails supports all of them (import-maps, by the way, is a web standard, not a Rails specific thing… and I love using it). You don’t need to use them and can pick which works best for your product/project. That’s a benefit in my opinion.

I also used my Rails knowledge to contribute to GitLab because I was misinformed that open source contribution would increase my prospective of getting hired. I contributed for around six months, got rejected multiple times, and then stopped all contributions to GitLab.

GitLab certainly has that reputation. I don’t see how that’s a knock against Rails though. Shitty companies will be shitty companies regardless of what stack they use. Personally, I never contribute any code to projects that have a commercial organization behind them. If it’s not GPL licensed (or similar) you’re probably getting screwed by spending your time working on it.