The #pluck_first freedom patch, first introduced by @danielwaterworth has served us well, and is used widely throughout both core and plugins. It seems to have been a common enough use case that Rails 6 introduced it's own method #pick with the exact same implementation. This allows us to retire the freedom patch and switch over to the built-in ActiveRecord method.
There is no replacement for #pluck_first!, but a quick search shows we are using this in a very limited capacity, and in some cases incorrectly (by assuming a nil return rather than an exception), which can quite easily be replaced with #pick plus some extra handling.
Doing .pluck(:column).first is a very common pattern in Discourse and in
most cases, a limit cause isn't being added. Instead of adding a limit
clause to all these callsites, this commit adds two new methods to
ActiveRecord::Relation:
pluck_first, equivalent to limit(1).pluck(*columns).first
and pluck_first! which, like other finder methods, raises an exception
when no record is found
Ted Johansson
Daniel Waterworth