I'm seriously not able to distinguish how many of these comments are about Ruby and how many are about Ruby on Rails (RoR). From the very beginning Ruby's popularity and criticism have hinged on RoR. And most people tend to conflate the two completely.

Personally, I love Ruby but don't like RoR. RoR seems to bloated to me. Of course it does many things. But very rarely have I come across projects which require all those things. And even then, I'm quite sure, we wouldn't be able to use all that RoR has to offer.

For many, many, years now, my stack has been Roda / Sinatra for routing and Sequel for DB access. And whenever, we've come across some requirement which needs heavy lifting, there are enough Ruby gems which do that without tying you up with the RoR framework.