I really like Rails and I don't see the controversy in anything DHH said. The strongest points for Rails always were productivity, developer ergonomics and strong conventions. Two out of three are now neutral in the age of agentic coding.

Strong conventions are my selling point to still choose rails for green-field projects in 2026. But I'm talking about LoB or CRUD-heavy apps. I wouldn't have chosen rails for an SMTP server. The HEY architecture was based on the productivity/performance trade-off. That trade-off is no longer worth it, since productivity is through the roof, let's prioritize performance and first class UX (the one you can only achieve in native apps).

In his shoes, I would have made the same decisions before and now.

Regarding the future of Rails. I feel this applies to a lot of other frameworks. The idea of frameworks was always to give devs a set of tools to solve problems faster and better. Tools that resonate with you. That you can find "synergy" with. Now you're not writing any of the code; you're barely even looking at it. So, what's the point of frameworks then? I don't know. Popular ecosystems already have out of the box solutions for almost everything. Rails, Django, Laravel, .NET, JVM and many more are mature enough. You could turn them all to maintenance mode and everything would be just fine. What future lies ahead? No idea.