Sorry, but blaming a single book for not learning something when there are an enormous number of other resources (and have been all along -- _why's was a long time ago, but so were, say Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails and the others mentioned here, and there has long been tons free on the web) probably means _you_ were actually the main cause.
i don't have time to commit to learning any random programming language that pops into my field of vision at all costs.
a language is a tool. a tool was being marketed to me as something of high quality. i tried it, but because of poor instructions (this book), didn't get the results i was expecting.
so i cut my losses and moved on to other tools that actually worked for me.
I feel like you might be a bit confused about the relationship between the world and one random person.
Additionally, I would say that my taste in humor and art tends towards the wacky and whimsical, and even twee sometimes I suppose.
But, like you.... maaaaaaaaaan, to say that book/guide didn't connect with me would be an understatement.
Among other issues I had, is that it begins (I'm paraphrasing) by describing Ruby as a seamless and intuitive extension of one's brain.
Now, I love Ruby, and think it's admirably friendly, but you still need a solid handle on basic computer science concepts to be good at it, and maaaaan there's a lot of unintuitive Ruby stuff out there and you hit it extremely quickly as soon as you venture outside of the standard library... and sometimes even before.
Even conventions like affixing ? and ! to methods is just a convention and ! is barely even a convention: it can mean "mutate in place" or "this method is going to try and do a thing, but might throw an exception instead so be ready to catch it" (ala ActiveRecord's #save!)
But... I am glad others like _why's work and get value from it.
While I enjoyed Why's guide, I found the Little Schemer book to be somewhat impenetrable in contrast. That book has a similar kind of style in the sense that it's in a non-traditional format and is widely praised, but I think it occupies the more intellectual / academic space than where Why's guide is targeted (that is, moreso at the regular Joe Blow programmer rather than someone who who lives and breathes everything CS). K&R seems to reach a good middle ground between practicality and whimsy.
I admit the comedy style is showing its age–a little cringe now.
So you rush out and higher 10 react developers, 10 go developers, and 10 support engineers to try and write a micro service replacement while keeping the ruby app alive long enough to finish the rewrite. Oh and an elixir developer somehow managed to sneak in.
Meanwhile your original 2 Ruby developers moved on, and their replacements are treated like dirt since Ruby Is on the way out... for a few years.