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

Same here. I’ve basically made my career as a rails developer and it’s never taken me very long to figure out the many applications I’ve worked with. Some of them are quite complicated.

Some of the older stuff built around rails overdid the meta-programming. Makes unraveling things a little more difficult, but you generally know where to look.

And every time I see a nontrivial state machine using a state machine gem, I know I’m in for a world of hurt. But I know exactly what mistakes I will be fixing. :)