I can’t imagine thinking the opposite either. People are different. Matz’s attempts at backwards compatibility in Ruby 3, particularly wrt typing haven’t been kind to its more elegant origins, but ‘dumpster fire’ is baffling to me. Some people do like php , though, so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ruby's === operator actually serves a useful purpose at least.

Yeah, I’ve tried out Crystal. I like it, I think it’s got a lot of potential. I like the improved performance, and the concurrency model. The community and ecosystem isn’t as strong, though. If I had to pick one right more, it would still be Ruby! I love Elixir too, for different reasons. It’s a completely different language, but with a similar style.
I had a look at Mirah back in the day. It’s like Ruby, with stronger, more static typing, that is designed-in better than Ruby’s bolted on typing additions.

Ruby gives you all kinds of tools to make clusterfucks, but it's not hard to keep your hands out of the metaprogramming cookie jar.

But with careful application even fucky features can be put to good use. Like monkey-patching a problematic method to only throw an exception rather than allow accidental misuse. With a nice verbose error message and good testing practices there's almost no risk.