It really didn't otherwise there would be a lot more than just those two, everyone would follow their beat. We all ran rails 10 years ago and realized that unless you're a large corp with money to burn on 'ecosystem' then Rails doesn't make a lot of sense.
I want to like rails and to see it do well, but it's not keeping pace with the rest of its peers. As competitive as web dev is these days, it's not sufficient to just be rails, you need a ruby alternative to rails as well. Look at javascript. Nobody uses javascript straight up, there's a multitude of rails-like frameworks for javascript. A new one is made each day, and they have staying power.
Ruby has Rails, and some might argue that metaphorically speaking Rails has Ruby, by its polite little balls. Unfortunately Rails's star power is outliving Ruby's and given that new Ruby devs aren't being born every day, it's not hard to see that that's bad for Rails.
I'd love to see rails move to JS or Elixir or something that'll get people interested in it again, and KEEP them this time by being written in something fast.
Rewriting all of Rails to a different language would be a humongous effort. And as you've mentioned it's been done tons of time already: almost every language has a "Rails-y" framework. Some are good, some a bit less so, but they exist. Rails in $other_language would also no longer be Rails, because other languages have different ways of doing things.
In short, if you don't want to use Ruby, then don't use Rails.
Also, many large Rails services have some performance-critical parts written in $other_language such as Elixer, Go, Rust, etc. "Using Rails" doesn't mean you need to use it for every last bit.
I want to like rails and to see it do well, but it's not keeping pace with the rest of its peers. As competitive as web dev is these days, it's not sufficient to just be rails, you need a ruby alternative to rails as well. Look at javascript. Nobody uses javascript straight up, there's a multitude of rails-like frameworks for javascript. A new one is made each day, and they have staying power.
Ruby has Rails, and some might argue that metaphorically speaking Rails has Ruby, by its polite little balls. Unfortunately Rails's star power is outliving Ruby's and given that new Ruby devs aren't being born every day, it's not hard to see that that's bad for Rails.
I'd love to see rails move to JS or Elixir or something that'll get people interested in it again, and KEEP them this time by being written in something fast.