I like Ruby but I don't like Rails. No idea if this is better now but I would get weird exceptions that would be from metaprogramming goofiness that was really difficult to debug and find documentation for, and it uniquely bothers me when I can't figure out where errors are coming from in code (same critique of async/nodejs). The general heaviness also just didn't mesh well with my programming style, I like things cleaner and more simple.

The Neocities frontend is basically something much simpler built on top of Sinatra and I haven't regretted that decision at all. It's (relatively) clean and simple, and if I need to do something weird that doesn't conform to the paradigm (this happens a lot), it quickly gets out of my way. You can generally do anything you want with Rails, but in my experience that more frequently involves digging through a bunch of documentation and google searches to try to figure out how to get the framework out of my way.

I've also found ruby to be a really solid language for doing lower level glue tasks, for an unusual example I use it to glue a redis database to powerdns, which serves a lot of query requests, it's plenty fast and very reliable. I've never had to rip out ruby from something more performance-oriented and replace it with something "faster".

At the same time if I had a team of 10 people I was working with I might appreciate Rails keeping everybody on the same design structure so I there's not an endless battle over how it should be put together, but in my past experience this kind of just happens with Rails too.