Because before rails 1.0, I worked in php.
Many people may actually be too young to remember, but the jump from php and anything else that was state-of-the-art at the time to rails was without doubt the biggest leap web development ever took.
The most meaningful advances actually weren't just technical but social. It would've been possible to write an excellent webapp before rails, but just about nobody ever did. The opinionated nature of Rails many are complaining about today was a revolution because it taught everyone using it good architecture. You can nitpick about any one of those opinions, sure. But back then it was common to join a project with >100kloc with directories containing password.php, passwprds.php, pass.v3-old.inc, large_image.head.2002-v1.jpg & employees.xls. The quality of almost any rails project I have seen is, in comparison, excellent. It'd say a new team member on a rails project was productive in less than a third of the time it took in non-rails projects at the time.
So, to anyone complaining: I'm pretty sure that looking into any of your strongest held believes on web dev, you'll discover that rails had significant influence in creating them in the first place. To do something like that, pretty much as just one guy on the beginning, should afford someone a certain amount of respect.