After 10 years in Ruby, I moved onto Rust four years ago, and don't plan on really looking back. But with that said, I'm glad you love Ruby! There are certainly things to love.
Personally, I just can't do without a good type system anymore. I think Rust has spoiled me. I do miss Ruby's powerful reflection features though.
I think I have a few "most favourite" technologies that all max out some principle or idea that I like.
The author here really hits on exactly why Ruby is my favourite "get things done" language. Rust, Typescript, and Crystal are all things I've worked with, but nothing gets out of my way like Ruby. It feels like sketching? It's very expressive thanks to it's prose-y syntax, but also metaprogramming + reflection like you mentioned really makes forming an idea while developing possible, at least much more possible than most other careful correctness-ensuring paradigms.
There's nuance to these things, and nothing is the best really. But I think satisfying a borrow handler or a type checker does slow down that flow for me. I'd pick up a brush if I know what I'm making for sure, but a piece of chalk if I'm just wanting to get something working. Personal taste of course!
Same. I used to love Ruby because it just matched the way I thought, and the standard library was layed out in a way that was consistent and easy to remember (one reason I never got into Python was that, while batteries may be included, the naming conventions are all over the place and I found every step of using them surprising). I fell out of love with it when 1.9 broke all my string manipulation code. The Rails crowd pushed the 'magic' stuff way farther than I was every comfortable with. I rarely made use of reflection, but even so find my old programs buggy enough due to mishandling of edge cases that I just don't really trust it anymore. TypeScript/Deno has mostly taken its place for me, though I don't find it quite as ergonomic for little system admin tasks as Ruby was.
Agreed, when Ruby became popular it was primarily competing against languages with verbose and rigid static type systems like Java. That is no longer the case, and the benefits of safety and developer experience provided by a good type system outweighs the cost.
Personally, I just can't do without a good type system anymore. I think Rust has spoiled me. I do miss Ruby's powerful reflection features though.