It seems like you’re taking this a bit further than the parent comment said - e.g. there’s no claim that any major piece of software can be refactored that quickly, however the general process can be made simpler and safer with decent static tooling.

As a concrete example on a small scale of something common such as renaming a model field name. Given that ActiveRecord reflects the database and generates the methods dynamically there’s pretty much no good way to refactor that field easily. It requires a lot of manual searching/filtering to find possible usages and then time on that to ensure it’s not a shared name on a different object type. From what I’ve seen in many code bases it ends up manifesting as `delegate` usage and often just expands the API exposed by the model.

Compare that to something compiled, or even something like python that doesn’t encourage meta too much, and you can pretty much find all symbol usages with whatever intellisense engine you prefer (ctags, JetBrains, jedi, ...)