Well 2010 PHP and the frameworks at the time were still going through the 5.x desert journey, and the prospects weren't entirely clear with the cancellation of PHP 6, so you wouldn't fault your 2010 self for not trying to push some Drupal/Joomla/Magento to that scale.

Kinda took until Facebook showing off Hacklang in 2014 for people to believe in getting more canonical programming features into PHP and make it more performant. So it would have been a good decision if one could predict 10 years into the future, but nobody can.

Rails was fully into growing pains and maintainability crises (some large rails codebases took years to migrate) and PHP was in transition; some good things by then but it was not what it is now.

All of the gripes OP has with Django are arguably worse in Rails.