The equivalent to passport in ruby is called omniauth. Having used both, don't really find a huge upside in the former compared to the latter, just different APIs.
I agree, and I'd hazard a guess that part of my slow-down was not knowing Ruby very well when starting. But the lack of intellisense made it difficult to grok, and the Rails libraries always feel more "magical" to me than the Node ecosystem.
IDE support (including code completion) for Ruby has been around for a while. RubyMine most notably, but AFAIK VSCode is pretty decent at it as well these days.
