Yeah I think the strongest argument is definitely "to each their own"! I was more exploring my own personal thoughts about the readability thing. I think I don't care enough or see a big enough win for ruby for me personally. But I think it's very reasonable for other people to feel the opposite, for sure.

On the jvm for performance thing... My big frustration with rails was always more about memory usage than compute performance (web app backends don't tend to do much compute!), and at least back when I was looking into it (a long time ago now!), the jvm implementations didn't help or actually actively hindered the effort to rein in memory usage. Also, and I think somewhat related (it takes time to write all that memory), I felt like long startup times made it so that we had to over-provision servers instead of being able to spin things up more on demand. This also isn't fixed by the jvm.

In general, rust and go feel like a breath of fresh air to me, operationally, because of much tighter memory overhead and fast startup. Maybe I could use the amazing ai tools we have now to solve those problems in ruby (or more likely for me personally at this point, python), but it feels like a very tall order when we already have languages that have taken this side of the various tradeoffs, from the start.

But again, I do recognize that this is totally my own personal analysis and others can very reasonably differ!