Generators, while nice, are nowhere near the most important thing that Rails brings that are often overlooked, even by "full featured" frameworks in other ecosystems.
- Migrations are well-implemented, and I've definitely wasted many cycles at other startups dealing with hand-rolled migration tools that are nowhere near Rails.
- The ORM (ActiveRecord), while very opinionated, is pretty full featured and suitable for 95% of use cases (and makes it fairly easy to drop out of it if needed)
- There's a host of security features that are taken care of you by Rails out of the box, including CSRF protection, session security and password hashing with a sane strategy and good algorithms (I'm sure there's others I'm missing)
- Websocket functionality comes out of the box with newer versions of Rails
- Asset handling, including minifying and digesting assets is included.
- Directory structure is set up for you (seems minor, but it's a huge productivity boost when joining a new team knowing where everything should be).
- A standard approach to background queueing, built in a way that it's extensible for different queue / worker backends (i.e. your jobs are cross-compatible with different background libraries and backend servers - I can come onto a Rails job that stores background jobs in Postgres, SQS, Redis, or anything else and how the jobs work is consistent).
Regarding speed, I'm certainly not going to argue that Ruby is faster than Go, but at least for the problems that I tend to work on, raw language execution performance is never really the bottleneck. It's cheap to throw money at, and 99% of the time when I look at poorly performing actions the culprit is the database or an external service.
