I also agree that it's rambling, but clearly not first language so I'll give it a pass.

The general thesis seems to be that The frustration that Solnic felt with Rails is understandable, and quite possibly inevitable, as rails has become mainstream, large, and a ripe target for disruption by other frameworks/libraries. Despite this, Rails is still an excellent framework due to it's easy-rampup for beginners, and flexibility for more experienced developers.

Here is my summary of the sections, as I understood them:

Accepting Reality:

- Ruby is not much without rails.

- Large frameworks are written by entities that can afford to, so they are not held to the whims of other large entities (angular/polymer for google, react for fb, etc). It's just a power struggle.

- Rails can be compared to Wordpress, though wordpress's codebase is worse, rails suffers from similar lockin as tools like wordpress and magento.

- The community of rails is well-connected, and if large enough entities invest in rails & ruby, it will be fine, and will continue progressing through the natural cycles of OSS projects

Laws of market reality:

- Rule 1) Hindsight is 20/20

- Rule 2) No solution is perfect

- Rule 3) You either build tools for yourself or for others, fits-you or fits-the-market

- Avoid building businesses completely on frameworks/platforms made available by large entities, as they may dissapear at a moment's notice (i.e. don't tunnel-vision angular because google might kill it like GWT)

- Beware of churn and external reasons for software projects being put out to pasture.

- There is too much churn, and there are too many companies trying to make the next big thing. This can maek the monopolies provided by ASP.NET and Rails very attractive.

- There are many similarities between rails, asp.net and spring in that they shield you from churn and offer a tyrannical but relatively-unchanging toolset

- Frameworks either die heroes or live long enough to become the villain

Why is this a problem for rails now? What is the history of rails and it's competitors?

- The technical points from Solnic's article mostly have merit

- DHH has flaws, and rails is very much his brainchild. He created it while he had a business to run

- People flocked to rails from various languages/frameworks (.NET, PHP, Java), so they could drop unnecessary abstractions

- People got addicted to writing ruby, for it's simplicity and productivity advantages over PHP, Java, and C#

- 2007-2011 were magical years (the silver age) for ruby adoption, every drinks rails koolaid. Merb tries to capitalize and fails (though it was ahead of it's time).

- 2011-2016 was a bittersweet period (the bronze age). Other languages have created their own frameworks, and are similarly productive to ruby, so they start to gain attention. Languages like Node, rust, clojure, elixir and even haskell.

- The bronze age also sees big companies start to release languages (apple with swift, google with dart and go, microsoft with typescript ASP.NET MVC, facebook with react)

- Rails is having this issue because it was meant to. It is being disrupted just as it's predecessors were. It is inevitable.

- Being the incumbent, rails is vulnerable because it cannot move or change as fast.

- The dominant model has also shifted, from rails-y backends to much simpler APIs talking to SPAs (Single Page Apps). Apis are much smaller cand can be written easily in various other languages

- For small to medium projects that fit rails's model, rails is still king. As wordpress is still king for blogs -- yes you could write a blog with go APIs and using react, but it's not wise.

- If you're using ra
ils as a medium sized company, make sure you're using all the lastest rails practices -- it may not make sense to pursue a rewrite right away.

Conclusion:

- Solnic has a point, the rails community has become a frustrating place to be for many people, but it has built lots of momentum. It also common for people to side with the underdog frameworks.

- Rails made the transition from underdog to mainstream in 5 years, and has done a lot for web development. It's hard to offer all of what rails offers and power the web as it has done.

- ActiveRecord is indeed a rough point for rail's architecture, but there's no alternative that offers benefit worth the pain of a rewrite. New applications thould definitely use rails + trailblazer or go straight to the Hanami framework, but most will probably just ditch ruby.

- ActiveRecord could be better, but it looks like even the creator of DataMapper has moved away from ORMs. For the usual case, ActiveRecord is still a good technology to use.

- Other communities will face the same issues rails is having, as they become mainstream. It's inevitable that DHH has chosen not to make large sweeping changes to rails, and although it alienates experienced developers, starting with rails is still easy for beginners.

- People forget the magic of rails that beginners feel when they start, and rails wins because of it's simplicity when learning as a beginner, as well as enabling experienced developers to make tweaks to it.

- It's anyone's guess whether rails will last another 10 years given all the competition it's currently facing