To be fair, I had this problem learning Rails too. I like knowing how and why something works, and so the "it just does this because that's the convention for Rails" was confusing and annoying rather than helpful, and trying to dig into the Rails code base to work out why was pointless.
Part of the reason I love Go is because there's no magic. I can look at the definition of a std lib function and it's right there, in plain code, and makes sense.
But despite Go being simpler than Rails (for this reason), I'm not sure that any given Go project is simpler than any given Rails project. The moving parts are more obscure, definitely, but I'm not sure there are more of them or that they're providing more complexity.
Part of the reason I love Go is because there's no magic. I can look at the definition of a std lib function and it's right there, in plain code, and makes sense.
But despite Go being simpler than Rails (for this reason), I'm not sure that any given Go project is simpler than any given Rails project. The moving parts are more obscure, definitely, but I'm not sure there are more of them or that they're providing more complexity.