Comment by Tainnor

As someone who started his career writing Ruby (but has since migrated to statically typed languages), I agree with your criticism. One big problem I had with the Rails community was the overemphasis on libraries/frameworks that make the code superficially look nice ("just put this dependency in your Gemfile, and it will automagically work") but aren't actually well-designed enough to be composable. The moment you're gonna have to do something out of the happy path, you're often out of luck.

The tagging problem in particular isn't such a hard problem that you' should need to pull in an extra dependency just for that. It's basically just a nested set of hash maps, the "hardest" part about it is the persistence - and I do believe it's worth spending maybe 2 hours on a proper DB schema in exchange for having code you own and understand.

There are other libraries in the Ruby ecosystem that take different approaches (dry.rb for example, which IMHO, strikes a better balance between the expressivity of Ruby and solid design), but they're not all that popular.