It's interesting to me that your experience with Rails sounds a whole lot like my experience with Node, and vice versa. Granted, I was able more quickly to become productive in Rails for trivial tasks, but the additional time cost it imposed on
nontrivial tasks more than swamped the early gain; while I have also found a knee in the efficiency curve for Node, it goes the other way.
But, in general, "friendly, fast, and forgiving" is exactly how I've always found the Node/Express tooling and ecosystem to be, while Rails has been among the least welcoming stacks I've ever had the displeasure to use - and, to your point about having to commit, in deciding "Rails: never again" I essentially threw away most of a year's worth of professional experience, which was so Rails-specific as to offer nothing useful in any alternate context. That's a choice I'm glad I made, rather than chasing the sunk cost, but if we're going to talk about things that require a lot of commitment, I think we have to talk about that kind of thing, too.
Based on the apparently almost mirror-opposite nature of our experiences with these platforms, I'm inclined to wonder whether the characteristics of either are strongly to blame, or whether instead it's a question of preference, or congruence between personal style and that of the platform, or just good vs. bad first impressions.
Not least to that last point, I do agree that a more reliably findable onboarding experience
might be warranted. But it does sort of come down to "put up or shut up", harsh as that may sound; again, without a BDFL or a One Right Way, there is no one to mandate such a thing must be done, and thus, until someone comes along with the knowledge and the passion to do it, that thing does not get done. There's some degree of cost in that, to be sure. But the difference in engagement makes it reasonable to ask whether it's as much of a problem as it might seem.