Do you eschew RoR and use an alternative Ruby web development approach? (Example: different framework, or writing your own framework)
The Neocities frontend is basically something much simpler built on top of Sinatra and I haven't regretted that decision at all. It's (relatively) clean and simple, and if I need to do something weird that doesn't conform to the paradigm (this happens a lot), it quickly gets out of my way. You can generally do anything you want with Rails, but in my experience that more frequently involves digging through a bunch of documentation and google searches to try to figure out how to get the framework out of my way.
I've also found ruby to be a really solid language for doing lower level glue tasks, for an unusual example I use it to glue a redis database to powerdns, which serves a lot of query requests, it's plenty fast and very reliable. I've never had to rip out ruby from something more performance-oriented and replace it with something "faster".
At the same time if I had a team of 10 people I was working with I might appreciate Rails keeping everybody on the same design structure so I there's not an endless battle over how it should be put together, but in my past experience this kind of just happens with Rails too.
I've built a few Sinatra/Flask systems since, so I'm definitely a fan of the virtue of simplicity, no matter the language.
The design mistake here is not applying lessons learned reading Danny Greenfeld's book (which I don't believe shipped before 2012) on Django and realizing the chapter on "vanilla Django" applies just as much to any system, like "vanilla Rails", because they are the same "stranger in a strange land" problems where the system as we know it becomes undocumented and unbounded by architectural style - a kind of McMansion Hell for system design.
The use of DSLs is complex territory. When in the hands of a master, amazing work can happen, but when too many DSLs are combined together, you wind up with exactly the opposite of what Greenfeld described in the chapter on vanilla Django, you wind up with byzantine Rails, because the boundaries that Alan Kay described decades earlier are not architectural. As with much software, there is no physics, real or implied, that applies to the phenomenological understanding of the system, the individual and social human scaling of brains that turns out to be a larger problem than computer hardware and software scaling.
There is a semantic asymptote, if you will, where the problem leaves the empirical world and becomes phenomenological - very difficult to share socially unless you are Kay, Knuth, or one of their contemporaries.
Jeremy Evans is the creator and maintainer of both of these Ruby gems and is super helpful in resolving ask kinda of issues.
I started the codebase over a decade ago now, and at the time Rails felt a little heavy (inline with your comments). That said, Rails does let you get started pretty quickly without needing much of anything else.
Rails has more magic. If you prefer less magic, then Sinatra is the way.
What problem are you trying to solve by asking these questions? What context is this question for? Are you curious how many people use a non-rails solutions for enterprise apps? Cloud apps? Personal projects? Apps you want users to pay for? A blog?
I'd suggest stating what problem you'd like to solve by asking this question so you can receive more detailed feedback. For example, if your company is spinning up a new app and you're evaluating choices, someone may respond that they used sinatra but found themselves reinventing rails so they wish they would have used rails. I'd say this is more insightful than "yea, we use sinatra". Alternatively, maybe someone used sinatra for a personal project and found the experience of reinventing rails rewarding and educational on their own time. Let us help you!
The whole service (which isn't too complex) is a file script in Ruby managed through SystemD. This script turns off/on the screen based on API calls, and is also in charge of scheduled/remote restarts, pinging the backend and stuff like that.
What I like the most is how easy and reliable is. Beeing a below average guy, ruby makes really easy to combine system calls, API calls and shell commands within the same context.
I first started writing my APIs using Sinatra about 10 years ago. I had started with Rails when it first came out around 2005, liked it, but then ran up against a lot of issues. Sinatra and the Sequel gem were amazing so I switched to that, since I didn’t need most of what Rails had.
Now I just use those two out of habit. Rails is a LOT better now, but i still just reach for Sinatra and Sequel usually.
Turns out, Rails is a really good web framework! I tried building Sitepress on something “light weight”, Tilt and Rack, and it was a pain. I found myself constantly solving the same problems that were already solved in Rails. At some point it dawned on me that I could just build on top of a few parts of Rails, so I did. I wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/
I’m glad I did! Now I can plug all of the Rails template handlers, view components, and other Rails plugins into it and ride off that entire community’s docs.
If you find yourself thinking, “rails is too heavy”, consider shedding the parts of Rails that you don’t need. Then as your application grows in complexity and you find yourself needing more parts of Rails, bring it back in.
I have a small project to explore the various multitasking paradigms in Ruby, here: https://github.com/rickhull/miner_mover
It provides everything needed, while still allowing to fully control which features I want to disable.
I've used Sinatra plenty of times but only used as a backend api, no frontend rendering.
I have tried Ruby CGI but very barebones - no MVC.
I haven't tried Sinatra, but someone at a Ruby web development company told me Sinatra works for APIs but difficult for websites, but it isn't battle-tested like Rails.