One decision put Ruby into a downward spiral. It's not too late to fix it

the issue is largely with the community not cz of UI libraries.

ruby is largely built around Rails. so when rails was hot & the trade-offs were worth it grew. now that Rails has a lot of controversy and not really worth then of course users dropped off.

within the JS community - the only two things that have a large market share are a express.js & React. but then again not everyone is forced into using them so even if the authors of React were racist or tryna be based - the market would largely move to other frameworks without blinking an eye.

with Rails - a lot of devs stayed away. & drained the new blood.

I love ruby by the way - such a fine expressive language.

I agree that Rails team embracing either ViewComponent or Phlex would be a good thing for the framework, but I don't think that why the framework has dropped off the way it has. The industry was convinced long ago that JS and React were the future, and that's where all of the YouTubers/TikTok programming influencers went. How do you fight an echo chamber with orders of magnitude more influence and reach, regardless of what they say?

I still believe Ruby and Rails are great tools for small to medium sized teams in 2026, and the shift back to SSR and framework conventions (looking at you "Rules of React") very much validates what Rails has been doing all along. But it's not sexy, and sex sells in this industry just like any other.