I don't know how to quantify how relevant Rails is today, but I do think it's interesting to explore why Rails isn't as popular as it once was. I remember just eight years ago, Rails was on the HN frontpage almost daily.
Some ideas:
I think the most critical trend has been the dissemination of the Ruby ecosystem's most popular and best ideas into every other ecosystem, which I would summarize as a culmination/caricature of a movement that was already in motion thanks to other ecosystems like Perl and Python. Rails was such a massive hit because it was a stark contrast to the tropes of complexity that came before it like endless XML configuration and IIS. I think Rails was a symbol of this whole renaissance, not single-handedly, but because it coincided so well with a critical-mass milestone in our industry and hit so hard with this cult of "fun and easy". And these days were back when https://rack.github.io/ came out and Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel which was Twitter's first web server and one of Ryan Dahl's inspirations for Node.js.
These represented identity-level changes in tech and its crescendo into the mainstream, not ideas that would merely spark and die in the Ruby ecosystem, so it's no surprise that Rails cannot command the same gravity over time.
Another trend has been the popularity explosion of smaller and simpler solutions over monolithic frameworks. For example, trending away from things like GWT and ExtJS and Ember and Meteor. Trending towards things like React and Express. No Rails analogue caught on in Node or Go and nobody cares.
There's also the explosion of Javascript which became such a viable alternative to other dynamically-typed languages (particularly Ruby in this context) that "why should I pick Ruby?" became a harder and harder question for beginners to answer.
Finally, there's the explosion of choice. One back-end application framework just can't dominate HN anymore like it could in 2007. I think React is the modern repeat of Rails in the sense that it popularized a new paradigm of building applications. And I think React will go the way of Rails in the sense that its ideas will become so ubiquitous that React itself won't stand out anymore, like when we see UIKit2 adopt these sorts of unidirectional data flow and FP ideas as a core first-class abstraction. And we'll get so used to it that we'll wonder "so what was the big deal about React again?"
Rails is certainly still amazing software and is clearly still improving. I generated a fresh Rails project half a decade ago after a long hiatus and was blown away when the error page in the browser had an embedded Pry REPL initialized at the error's stack frame iirc. That's some wtf-level polish. And I can only imagine how much better Rails has become since.
I think that most folks would be completely shocked to realize that they can run a command like: rails new future --skip-sprockets --skip-coffee --webpack=react --database=postgresql
Although, I would argue that they should check out StimulusJS instead of defaulting to React... it pairs up beautifully with Turbolinks 5. All preconceived notions about earlier versions of TL need to be discarded because it's actually pretty awesome now.
> ... it was a stark contrast to the tropes of complexity that came before it like endless XML configuration and IIS.
DHH has stated that he started Rails because of frustrations with the Java web app development ecosystem, and this rings true for me from my own experience. What surprises me about the illustration of the contrast of the two worlds is that, after 12-15 years of Rails, and the success its had in addressing its stated objectives, the Java "world" seems to only be adding to the complexity of their "standard" stack. Sure, you get install JHipster, and generate a boilerplate site now, but that process took FORTY-FIVE MINUTES on my work laptop, and I don't know half of the stuff it installed.
Some ideas:
I think the most critical trend has been the dissemination of the Ruby ecosystem's most popular and best ideas into every other ecosystem, which I would summarize as a culmination/caricature of a movement that was already in motion thanks to other ecosystems like Perl and Python. Rails was such a massive hit because it was a stark contrast to the tropes of complexity that came before it like endless XML configuration and IIS. I think Rails was a symbol of this whole renaissance, not single-handedly, but because it coincided so well with a critical-mass milestone in our industry and hit so hard with this cult of "fun and easy". And these days were back when https://rack.github.io/ came out and Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel which was Twitter's first web server and one of Ryan Dahl's inspirations for Node.js.
These represented identity-level changes in tech and its crescendo into the mainstream, not ideas that would merely spark and die in the Ruby ecosystem, so it's no surprise that Rails cannot command the same gravity over time.
Another trend has been the popularity explosion of smaller and simpler solutions over monolithic frameworks. For example, trending away from things like GWT and ExtJS and Ember and Meteor. Trending towards things like React and Express. No Rails analogue caught on in Node or Go and nobody cares.
There's also the explosion of Javascript which became such a viable alternative to other dynamically-typed languages (particularly Ruby in this context) that "why should I pick Ruby?" became a harder and harder question for beginners to answer.
Finally, there's the explosion of choice. One back-end application framework just can't dominate HN anymore like it could in 2007. I think React is the modern repeat of Rails in the sense that it popularized a new paradigm of building applications. And I think React will go the way of Rails in the sense that its ideas will become so ubiquitous that React itself won't stand out anymore, like when we see UIKit2 adopt these sorts of unidirectional data flow and FP ideas as a core first-class abstraction. And we'll get so used to it that we'll wonder "so what was the big deal about React again?"
Rails is certainly still amazing software and is clearly still improving. I generated a fresh Rails project half a decade ago after a long hiatus and was blown away when the error page in the browser had an embedded Pry REPL initialized at the error's stack frame iirc. That's some wtf-level polish. And I can only imagine how much better Rails has become since.