Sarcasm is really lost on you. Zed Shaw's blog was a pretty big hit when it was posted, because he was a very relevant person in the community (he wrote Mongrel in case you don't place him). The term ghetto stuck to this day, mostly as a joke.
As for Rail being "far and away the best choice for developing pretty much any normal web app", that may be true if one define a normal Web app as being a CRUD application with a REST architecture, that covers lots of ground, but still far from universal.
As for Rail being "far and away the best choice for developing pretty much any normal web app", that may be true if one define a normal Web app as being a CRUD application with a REST architecture, that covers lots of ground, but still far from universal.