Where other languages have footguns, I've often described Ruby as offering footchainsaws, while tempting you to juggle them for fun. Far more damaging if you aim it at the wrong thing, but also far better at cutting down things that stand in your way.
I think it's the most enjoyable language I've used. With care and feeding it's amazing. I would absolutely not want to use it in a large company, that would be a walking nightmare.
Yes, I want to highlight what you say about large companies. ruby really shines, I think, if you are a solo dev or a small team, where everybody is on the same page and the codebase is completely understood. It is also good for libraries with a clear focus. For larger projects, it might work too, but you would need some good culture of "keep it simple" around it. A few ego-trips of supposedly smart devs and things can get hard to understand and hard to work with fast.
Here we go again with the Ruby isn't suitable for large projects nonsense. Github, Shopify and Stripe seem to be managing perfectly fine with Ruby, thank you very much.
Sure, but as I said, probably not without establishing some culture around it. Just for fun, let's look at shopify's Ruby Style Guide under "General"[0]:
Avoid mutating arguments.
Avoid monkeypatching.
...
Avoid needless metaprogramming.
Prefer public_send over send so as not to circumvent private protected visibility.
Write ruby -w safe code.
...
Every big company has (and if they don't, they should) style guides. In Ruby people tend to use something like Rubocop (which is a static code analyzer/linter) to agree on a style. That will even be added as a default in Rails 8.
I think it's the most enjoyable language I've used. With care and feeding it's amazing. I would absolutely not want to use it in a large company, that would be a walking nightmare.