I don't particularly want to be involved with a long lived and non trivial collection of Ruby code either, if my experience of the Gitlab codebase is anything to go by.

I agree with the author's point, if you replace Ruby with something less awful (Deno, Go, etc.)

This feels like the exception that proves the rule. Gitlab has one of the largest Rails codebases on earth. It's also been built by a decentralized remote engineering org from the start. I think that explains a lot.

Compare that to my personal experiences and that of my colleagues who work heavily with Rails: We show up to a new job at any level of seniority, spend a week or two learning the codebase, and immediately have a firm grasp of all the major components of the application. And I want to stress _firm_ grasp, since everything from the model structure to the ORM to where you can expect to find tests is standard.

Obviously no framework or convention will hold perfectly in the extremes