Could you elaborate? After a ~10 years hiatus I revisited Rails last year and whipped up a CRUD app with auth in no time. No SPA in sight.

This was always Rails' strength from day one. The problems came when you tried to do anything that didn't fit into the guardrails laid down by RoR.

They've been mucking with the asset pipeline every single version and their forray into webpacker has been a disaster. Turbolinks and ActionCable have been attempts to compete with SPAs while still being SSR but both are just glitchy and a source of endless Heizenbugs. Thankfully Rails7 looks like they've restored sanity.

I have high hopes that Rails 7 will be much saner. Importmaps are such a Railsy solution, and if you need anything more jsbundling-rails will provide easy starters for ESbuild, Rollup and Webpack.

I must admit that zhe Turbolinks does glitchy stuff with the theme I ripped ( project is in the Ask-for-forgiveness stage ).

But you don't need to use Actioncable at all. But I do use it, to have my C/C++ clients communicate with the SaaS. Haven't experienced anything flaky there yet and I am glad a Websocket option was included.