The theme between these efforts seems to me: Instead of a separate language in a separate world, our views are normal objects/data (in all their glory and power) that happen to know how to print themselves as html.

I'm certainly no cultist of MVC, but I would tend to agree with them that tightly coupling presentation details to the basic model is usually unwise.

You're not supposed to put these into your models. You should create a different class/method that accepts models and returns HTML:

    class TweetWidget
      def initialize(tweet)
        @tweet = tweet
      end
      
      def content; … end
    end