In rails you get these things for free. What I don't get is why everyone rolls their own framework with node.js. It's basically 90s PHP all over again.
EDIT: Soft delete is a trivial piece of code when the framework has a well defined transaction system for its ORM. It's not really related to Rails per se. Your statement is extremely disingenuous, while trying to look smart. Audit trails _can_ be(but don't have to be) more complex, especially when the framework uses a lot of stored procedures to handle operations. But other than that these frameworks are specifically designed to REDUCE complexity of such operations, dependency costs - which are huge in node.js, specifically because you can mix and match anything into everything.
Node.js people tend to stitch together XSS solutions, random templating solutions based on their frontend work, even basic salting of auth passwords becomes unpredictable because you have 30 options on minimal auth libraries.
But yes nothing is ever free. If you want to use Rails you still have to learn ruby and the framework and a basic understand of how ActiveRecord builds queries if you want to be writing performant code. And the same applies to Laravel, Django, or whatever of the 50 patchwork node.js solutions you want to base your code on.
I don't know why you're ragging on Node.js users or even PHP for that matter as both ecosystems have this stuff covered too.
Also you're comparing language/runtime with an actual framework and then dogging those users...
If you want to compare Rails with Node/PHP then I'd suggest comparing with things like Laravel (PHP), Adonis (Node) and you'll find everything you can do in Rails is done in Node/PHP too.
What percentage of production Node.js systems use Adonis? It's probably vanishingly low. Laravel is nice, and it's been gaining a lot of adoption in new applications, but the GP said "90s PHP" for a reason. Modern Node JS backends are often littered with hand rolled SQL queries, poor MVC separation, and lots of shoddy, half baked model layers—often without using any library whatsoever. Which is a real shame, because I personally really love programming in JavaScript, and the performance is great, but the strength of Rails as a framework draws me back in every time.
Bad. Like really bad. Unless you're doing it for some small corner case where you need up to the list bit of performance, raw SQL queries and mapping them to objects or manually moving or many pulsating the result sets manually is really bad. Specially for others having to maintain your code 3 years later.
Personally I prefer the opposite, I have managed many old projects (10+ years old) and I always prefer raw SQL over some outdated ORM that is hard to configure and finetune. With SQL I have access to one of the most powerful query languages in existence that can never be matched by an database layer written in general purpose language.
Raw SQL can be a bit problematic if it is spread out in the entire code base with little structure ("littered"), however that is relatively easy to fix by centralizing the queries with a repository pattern. It is much harder to fix an ORM ten years later.
Do we know why ORM's are popular? I don't think it has to do with that ORM's are good, rather that developers want to avoid SQL because lack of experience, but that is me guessing based on my prejudice (I was myself in that category as a junior).
And I'm sure there's many similar situations like that in Ruby, Python, and other languages, you just don't hear about them because they don't power 99% of the internet like PHP and JavaScript does. ;)
I have to admit I'm getting a bit of fatigue reviewing frameworks in Node that are claimed to be batteries-included and similar to Rails/Django/Laravel. SailsJS, Redwood, NestJS, Remix, Prisma (ORM compared to Active Record). They all have an exciting landing page, clean looking documentation... but once you dig in further the feature set starts looking very <= Rails v1.0.
Anyways I appreciate the name drop of Adonis. I'll have to give it a fair shake when I'm not feeling quite as cynical because I _really_ do want to find a solid Node framework in this area.
Most "full stack" frameworks in the node ecosystem consider themselves "full stack" just because you can run code on the server. See the Fresh (deno) discussion here in HN from a few weeks ago.
To me a framework which doesn't come with a clear way to do translations, background jobs, query builder, ORM, migrations, asset bundling, validations, error handling, etc it is not full stack. It is just "server code compatible" at best.
Adonis is far, far, far from reaching even a small percent of what Laravel is. It has almost no community and very little or almost no third party packages. When I tried it las year I couldn't even find a formatter for the templates.
Later I've found out the author of the framework has fake accounts pretending to be a happy user of it, and that was the end of it for me.
Nothing is free. In Rails you have _currently well maintained libraries_ for this. There are still complexity costs, dependency costs, data costs, performance cots, etc, etc, etc.
Which is funny because Laravel give you this for free as well through it's ORM. Soft deletes are an easily solved problem with $table->softDeletes() in your migration.
I think the key on this comment is "90s". Modern PHP is very different. As you say, Laravel makes trivial and a joy to use things that in 90s PHP are like today's node.
EDIT: Soft delete is a trivial piece of code when the framework has a well defined transaction system for its ORM. It's not really related to Rails per se. Your statement is extremely disingenuous, while trying to look smart. Audit trails _can_ be(but don't have to be) more complex, especially when the framework uses a lot of stored procedures to handle operations. But other than that these frameworks are specifically designed to REDUCE complexity of such operations, dependency costs - which are huge in node.js, specifically because you can mix and match anything into everything.
Node.js people tend to stitch together XSS solutions, random templating solutions based on their frontend work, even basic salting of auth passwords becomes unpredictable because you have 30 options on minimal auth libraries.
But yes nothing is ever free. If you want to use Rails you still have to learn ruby and the framework and a basic understand of how ActiveRecord builds queries if you want to be writing performant code. And the same applies to Laravel, Django, or whatever of the 50 patchwork node.js solutions you want to base your code on.