For what it's worth, the last few years our we've sliced off a few custom client apps in Rails and it's felt like a great tailwind. We've been running a profitable BI app for around 15 years, but it's really hard to maintain. The dev team decided we want to rewrite it from .NET, Python, React into vanilla full-stack Rails. We were planning to rewrite it anyway to fix many old assumptions that turned out to be wrong and made maintenance a lot harder. It should also reduce the required coordination of backend API + frontend being that it's more cohesively developed together. But ultimately, we've enjoyed using an opinionated framework that has all the typical "web app" things batteries included and well-established. It helps discovery.
I think it works well for SaaS type offerings where you have a low number of high-value clients. We don't do high-traffic public sites. Perhaps my opinion would be different then.
A lot of people seem to overcomplicate it by bringing their thoughts on how other modern js apps are written. It would be helpful to have a specific example of some of the things you need to work through. Reading through the [handbook](https://hotwired.dev/) should get you most of the way there.
One of my colleagues recently switched from mostly react to default full stack Rails. He was really struggling with how to filter things in a table. When I showed him how I would do it, his comment was along the lines of: “I can’t believe how simple this is. Modern JS just doesn’t work this simple any more. This is like how jquery used to work but way more organized”.
I can’t say I know enough about modern js development to validate that comment. He noted something about expectations of how the dom managing things…
So, if you’re coming with a certain mindset of how to do things, try to leave that behind a moment and read through the handbook. Especially if it involves making fetch requests to do things. That’s like, the number one “you probably shouldn’t do it like that” in Hotwire.
I think it works well for SaaS type offerings where you have a low number of high-value clients. We don't do high-traffic public sites. Perhaps my opinion would be different then.