I think part of the reason this doesn't come up in Ruby is that Ruby doesn't have Python's powerful namespacing system.

In Python, it's reasonable to have a package with just functions in it, whereas in Ruby, writing a top-level method means polluting every object in the system. You can write modules that have singleton methods on them, but you still don't have anything as flexible as Python's "from pkg import foo, bar"—the caller needs to either write "ModuleName.my_function" at every call site, or use "include" and end up with the module's methods as part of the consuming class's interface.