What I traditionally would've used Rake tasks for has been replaced with data-migrate, a little gem that handles data migrations in the same way as Rails schema migrations. It's the perfect way to automate data changes in production, offering a single pattern for handling data backfills, seed scripts, and the like.

The pros are numerous:

• Data migrations are easily generated via CLI and are templated with an up and down case so folks think about rollbacks.
• Just like with Rails schema migrations, there's a migration ID kept around that ensures data migrations are run in order. Old PRs will have merge conflicts.
• You can conditionally run data migrations alongside schema migrations with bin/rails db:migrate:with_data.

It's a really neat gem. I'll probably still rely on the good ol' Rake task for my personal projects, but will doubtless keep data-migrate in the toolbox for teams.