I would choose Rails if my biggest concern were time to market and server costs weren't a huge concern.<p>For any kind of site where you're selling a service or product and for the vast majority of freemium models, Rails is great. You'll have to scale a bit sooner than if you chose something like PHP, Node or Go, but you'll have plenty of revenue to pay for it. You'll also either get to profitability or to the point where you realize your experiment is a failure a lot faster.<p>I wouldn't use Rails if I were working on something really simple or if my plan were to monetize off of ad revenue and a huge base of free users.
Ruby is alive and well. A beautifully written language with an incredible community. Rails only gets stronger and you can look at Shopify for just one example of very large production rails apps. How about Gitlab? There are many more.<p>It's a quick and easy way to iterate a design while getting out of the way. React can just talk to a rails API and boom you're building the MVP with a simple rails new command. One command to generate models. It's just fucking beautiful. And not bloat like node, rack is a few thousand lines. Idk I'm not an expert but it's just a great platform, why the fuck should anyone not use it? Plenty of reasons exist but it's the right tool for a set of jobs.