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
This reduces chances of errors where consumers of strings mutate inputs
and reduces memory usage of the app.
Test suite passes now, but there may be some stuff left, so we will run
a few sites on a branch prior to merging
