The Rails experience of 15 years ago is still achievable, with Rails, today. It's even better if you can believe it. You just have to throw out the notion of SPA frameworks and be willing to actually learn how HTML / CSS works. I read an article here a month ago about how nobody's willing to do that.
The deficiency in web standards that SPA frameworks were invented to resolve have all been fixed, there's nothing they offer anymore that you can't do without them. But they hang over the neck of the web world like an albatross.
The development experience is almost always really smooth and there are more and more tools to further smoothen that experience every day.
There are definitely better tools out there but given how the web ecosystem functions, it could be much worse.