I tend to agree. Ruby isn't super applicable in 2017 either. Most tech companies have moved to a microservices architecture and while they may have some legacy Ruby hanging around, it's unlikely they're building anything new with it.

Someone learning web development now has a long road ahead of them. They'll need to learn everything. Not just some backend language, but all the front-end frameworks, functional programming, Sass, build tools, typescript, etc. The list is endless.