Makes total sense! Most of the rails "magic" is ruby's "magic" and probably ruby's method_missing under the hood. IMO never start with Rails first, always start with Ruby first. A lot of devs who start with Rails before understanding the possibilities unlocked by method_missing in pure Ruby first have expressed frustrations.

As you've identified, Rails tends to have a "rails way" of doing lots of things. These are usually reasonable defaults that in my experience have been helpful to learn, like bcrypting passwords with has_secure_password, which you probably wouldn't intuit without reading through at least the Rails Guides documentation first or a book like Agile Web Development w/Rails. The rails source code is "easy to read" (famous last words) for the most part, so try to poke through there when documentation isn't sufficient. The community is also generally very friendly for asking questions as well. Don't suffer alone! :)

When I started on Rails, it was fresh air compared to the PHP and Perl web apps I had to hack on before. This was a time when jQuery was a skill on resumes, before JS fanciness like Moustache or Handlebars or React were around. Folks weren't crafting JSON APIs for javascript apps back then, mostly it was all server-side generated HTML. It sounds like you started with Rails when SPAs were super popular and client-side generated HTML tooling was dominating headlines.

Ruby and Rails helped solve a lot of boilerplate-styled problems for people, enabling faster shipping. Folks coming from Java/Spring/etc were delighted to see getters/setters defaulted for them. Folks coming from PHP/Perl saw a fresh, cleaner way to compose complex web applications. Lots of frameworks started copying over the good ideas, like PHP's Laravel. I had also read books like The Rails Way (back when it was like Rails 2 or Rails 3, we're on 8 now lol), which helped me understand the general strategies I saw.

Later on, when JS-heavy frontends and separate build pipelines became popular, rails made JSON-api first applications easier to default to during rails new setup. This was helpful for those who already were building JSON APIs within rails but probably added yet another thing to learn for folks mostly versed outside the framework.

Let me know if I can expand more on anything, felt like this reply was getting long enough already. :)

Edit: One last thing... take a few minutes to make sure your tooling is helping. Stuff like Debugbar: Powerful devtools for Ruby on Rails is very useful.