I'm a solo Rails developer and I'm very happy with the productivity. ActiveRecord, as an example of Rails's power and opinionatedness, is extremely powerful. As an abstraction, it does occasionally "leak", and you have to look under the hood, but the ability to compose together code that compiles down to SQL is so much better than trying to compose together strings of SQL.
I think it's also worth looking at the Rails front-end story. StimulusJS is one of my favorite parts of the Rails stack (though totally usable elsewhere). Instead of ever again writing an event listener in JavaScript, you can write it inline in your HTML, using data-* attributes. It is to JavaScript what Tailwind is to CSS. I heard DHH in a podcast talk about the value of seeing your actions directly in the HTML, not needing to open your JS file to know what's going on. Stimulus and also Turbo definitely have an interesting place in the world and are extremely powerful when they're a good fit. On the other hand, I've still had use for React at times.
Outside of Rails, I'm excited to try Remix (https://remix.run/) because of its batteries-included approach and what seems like a novel approach to server-side rendering without all the work.
I think it's also worth looking at the Rails front-end story. StimulusJS is one of my favorite parts of the Rails stack (though totally usable elsewhere). Instead of ever again writing an event listener in JavaScript, you can write it inline in your HTML, using data-* attributes. It is to JavaScript what Tailwind is to CSS. I heard DHH in a podcast talk about the value of seeing your actions directly in the HTML, not needing to open your JS file to know what's going on. Stimulus and also Turbo definitely have an interesting place in the world and are extremely powerful when they're a good fit. On the other hand, I've still had use for React at times.
Outside of Rails, I'm excited to try Remix (https://remix.run/) because of its batteries-included approach and what seems like a novel approach to server-side rendering without all the work.