> Rails is also ancient already.

I think Rails both boosted Ruby and killed it. When I ask people about why they dislike Ruby it's usually due to something specific to Rails (plus some comments around syntax which are easily dismissed or accepted).

I used to be a pretty heavy Ruby user and I still love the language, though I have only used Rails sparsely and not by choice.

I had the opportunity to work on a Ruby project for a couple weeks a few years ago and it was such a pleasure to read through the code and interpret it! It was unfortunately another project that was being replaced with something else because Ruby skills were harder to find.