'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together. including much of it that is rendered using other technologies. hotwire? javascript and websockets. The thing that always gets me about Rails (and I am a decades long fan of it,) is that when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes. Sure rails 1.0 didn't have websockets bundled in but it did indeed come built on Prototype.js, which if you still have in a rails 8 project probably gets a lot of laughs. There's a lot more to 'staying current' in a long lived rails app than just upgrading the gems.
>'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together.
That was roughly my point - unless there's something wrong in my mental model, a Rails user is someone who trusts Rails to get them a sane and consistent bundled pack of tools so they can skip the choice and get to work. If one is going to choose a different set of tooling later on, that seems to defeat the point of using Rails in the first place.
I was not judging the framework itself, for the record. Just saying that if you go for it, going "vanilla" seems like the only sensible choice.
>when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes.
this does sound like a major con indeed.