It's like digital cameras that came around. Many users knew how to use film cameras so you made the digital cameras to be mostly like film cameras even if the digital medium would have enabled a very different, much better camera straight out of the box. But the market had invested so much time in this learning how to work with film that you had to do it like that. Path dependency is not just about rigid thinking, it's about using what you have because that saves a lot of resources.
Regarding, .map being all wrong, in Ruby it's not a property of an array, it's a method for enumerables. Array is one type of enumerable, but it works with hashmaps etc. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.6.5/Enumerable.html So it's not that non-general. It is noisy (and weird with the pipes) because it's general.