That's rather ironic, because I read your comment you linked to, and it is pure speculation.
The Goodreads dev said "the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there". I'm not sure why you think that is or ever was "the Rails way", but it seems more like the classic "move fast and break stuff" startup engineering than anything resembling rails to me.
The Goodreads dev said "the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there". I'm not sure why you think that is or ever was "the Rails way", but it seems more like the classic "move fast and break stuff" startup engineering than anything resembling rails to me.