The emphasis on magic was a particularly bad decision. It looked wonderful in the original screencasts that let you build a webapp in 5 minutes. It causes terrible pain when you're trying to do something complicated.

This was one of the mistakes Django made and - to their credit - got over relatively quickly. It began as a kind of imitation of Rails but they stripped out the magic pretty quickly and made it a lot more explicit.

Its the culture. My first RoR application a decade ago had basically no dependencies. The medium article implies the cool kids won't build an app unless it has enough dependencies to be unmaintainable and undeployable. So either you can't use the cool kids or you can't use the tool, the combo is no longer sustainable, its just done. The high time preference people will insist you install GEMs until the crash, its a technological bubble of sorts.

Also my first CRUD app was very small and boring. That means un-debuggable isn't a big deal. Now apps are huge, therefore undebuggable. Even if you limit external dependencies that doesn't help internal dependencies.

You can prototype things quickly, as long as they're small, featureless, no one uses them, and you don't care how difficult the are to deploy or debug. Other than that, no problem. Hmm.