NodeJS and the siren's song of using the same language on the server as the client.
Despite the popularity, node never caught up with rails in terms of features and productivity. I was part of a replatforming from rails to node some 10 years ago. So many things we had to just rewrite because there was no option at the time in node. The team lead that made the decision left half-way through the project. Second worst thing to happen to me in my career, after covid of course.
Well and that JS is really fast thanks to V8 and TS has leapfrogged Ruby in terms of developer tooling. Personally I think Ruby is a nicer language and JS has a lot of odd quirks but it became Java. A good natural choice that can be used for any project.
Java is both significantly faster than JS and significantly less buggy/footgunny. JS is pretty much just a bad language in my mind. It seems specifically designed to create as many bugs as humanly possible. It's a lot like C++ in that way, but at least C++ is actually performant.
Despite the popularity, node never caught up with rails in terms of features and productivity. I was part of a replatforming from rails to node some 10 years ago. So many things we had to just rewrite because there was no option at the time in node. The team lead that made the decision left half-way through the project. Second worst thing to happen to me in my career, after covid of course.