I'm going to disagree with you there. First, apart from the ActionCable dependencies, Rails is already very modular. Starting from version 3 you can cherry-pick exactly what you want and don't want. For example, I have a couple of Rails apps that don't use the database, so they don't load ActiveRecord. See also nateberkopec's comment on disabling ActionCable.
Second, I find Rails to still be the most productive web framework. Removing every last bit of redundancy is nice, but it isn't going to save me that much. Maybe it'll save me a couple tens of MBs of disk space, and a couple of MBs of RAM per process. But if that costs me a few hours of work, it isn't worth it. Disk space costs next to nothing and RAM is cheap. Maybe optimizing that makes sense if you're Facebook, but most people are not.
Every time I use Node.js, Sinatra, etc I find myself wasting time around the most basic things, e.g. directory structures, database migrations, logging, etc.
Second, I find Rails to still be the most productive web framework. Removing every last bit of redundancy is nice, but it isn't going to save me that much. Maybe it'll save me a couple tens of MBs of disk space, and a couple of MBs of RAM per process. But if that costs me a few hours of work, it isn't worth it. Disk space costs next to nothing and RAM is cheap. Maybe optimizing that makes sense if you're Facebook, but most people are not.
Every time I use Node.js, Sinatra, etc I find myself wasting time around the most basic things, e.g. directory structures, database migrations, logging, etc.