You basically described it as if the only business value to be had in software is making a CRUD app. I won't even correct you, I know an overwhelming amount of developers who keep churning out the same CRUD app over and over. With small differences in schema, validation, business rules here and there.
It's a life, I don't judge it.
But it's also shoddy engineering, wasteful, redundant, and eventually this class of applications will disappear, replaced by one of a few winning content management platforms which do CRUD even better than RoR does, and more. RoR's opinionated approach, aside from constraining you so don't make something stupid, it also constrains you INTO doing quite a lot of stupid things.
Everyone has the confidence they're good at their job. But my experience is I've not seen anyone I really respect in this industry, who enjoys RoR's architectural choices.
See, the trouble with being opinionated, is that others also have opinions.
I see this argument as that structural engineers are making their own steel by hand.
Unfortunately that is not the way complex structures are built.
Real mechanical or structural engineers use mostly off the shelf components or pre-made parts unless they run into really specific cases.
That is why my stance is that frameworks and especially opinionated ones are the future.
Mostly because IMO content management platforms are too rigid and I am against those just as IMO opinionated frameworks are giving best tradeoff between “making my own steel from scratch” and “this is the thing you cannot change”.
There is whole space for CRUD apps as there are still many companies doing stuff on paper. We can argue about AI or fancy algorithms all day but there is whole world that doesn’t even care.
The way "you see my argument" is like someone who just learned what a strawman is, and was very excited to try it out.
The issue at hand is architecture, which engineers are very much interested in, and not underlying infrastructure implementation details, which would fall closer to the category of "raw materials".
Despite that, in the real world engineers have been concerned even with the shape of the sand particles forming their building's foundation, as it impacts the structural integrity of the entire project (actual case study in Dubai).
You find CMS-es too rigid. I find CMS-es can be more flexible than RoR, which I find too rigid, UNLESS you fork it and break the framework constraints, which is what Twitter did early on, BTW, so they can evolve the app.
But it depends what you call a CMS. A person well versed in CRUD apps, seems to think of a CMS as a premade CRUD app, just bunch of forms with a few fields and a WYSIWYG HTML editor for the page body. But that's primitive, and barely scratching the surface.
I wonder if you're familiar with Drupal's node architecture. I don't like Drupal, but it's popular, so it can be a subject of discussion. The Emacs buffer architecture is also relevant, despite we don't often think of Emacs as a CMS.
It's a life, I don't judge it.
But it's also shoddy engineering, wasteful, redundant, and eventually this class of applications will disappear, replaced by one of a few winning content management platforms which do CRUD even better than RoR does, and more. RoR's opinionated approach, aside from constraining you so don't make something stupid, it also constrains you INTO doing quite a lot of stupid things.
Everyone has the confidence they're good at their job. But my experience is I've not seen anyone I really respect in this industry, who enjoys RoR's architectural choices.
See, the trouble with being opinionated, is that others also have opinions.