I often find the sort of over-the-top implementations you describe in gems that were written by Rails users. Since other frameworks and vanilla are not super uncommon, it's fairly normal to make your gem that you envisioned being used within a Rails app not dependent on Rails. If those developers read too much Rails framework code (or toxic blog posts from DHH) and got the wrong idea, then it's not surprising they imitated what they thought was the way to do things.
