Rails doesn't force anything, you can change default batteries out for different ones (this analogy, like most falls down pretty quickly). Ruby itself allows a lot of coding style freedom with the creator of Ruby stating the goal being developer happiness. What causes readability and maintainability issues are the people writing/maintaining the code, no matter what language its written in.
Regarding "function soup inside HTML templates" I think you should strongly consider Rails Hotwire [0] (in Rails 7+, add-on for 6.1) and having the server, well, serve the HTML. Rails is a full stack framework and Turbo/Hotwire can do a lot of the heavy lifting for dynamic applications.
Regarding "function soup inside HTML templates" I think you should strongly consider Rails Hotwire [0] (in Rails 7+, add-on for 6.1) and having the server, well, serve the HTML. Rails is a full stack framework and Turbo/Hotwire can do a lot of the heavy lifting for dynamic applications.
[0] https://hotwired.dev/