I pretty strongly disagree with the idea that Ruby encourages those bad habits. But Rails? Specifically, ActiveSupport? Yeah, totally. But, effectively, Rails is building a context-specific DSL for web apps that happens to be leaking methods into your code. This is much, much more a Rails problem than it is a Ruby one.

My standard web stack is grape, grape-swagger, grape-entity, and Sequel (with some handy libraries like Ougai kicking around) and I don't run into any problems like that.