This shows you how wild and wooly the "early" days of rails was - I forget whether it ran its own instance of sqlite, or was just a completely in-memory hash of hit counts ala counts[controller][action] += 1 that you had to retrieve. Either way it was extremely primitive, predating really what we think of as monitoring and analytics data being its own process and pipeline. But that was also part of the genius of it - as you say, you'd be hard pressed to hack something together that solved a real problem for customers in an afternoon that way these days.

I do think it would be a great thing to incorporate into a monitoring and observability tool - my day job at the moment is related and I hope to work in that area of research a bit. Necessary Disclaimer time: my opinions are my own personal opinions, not professional opinions or those of my employer or anyone else.