If you really love strings, you might now
    be thinking "better than a string? easy:
    multiple strings." And you wouldn't be
    that far off! Some editors do represent
    text as an array-of-lines with each line
    being a string. VS Code's Monaco editor
    worked that way for quite a while, but an
    array of strings can still be plagued by
    the same problems as a single string.
    Excessive memory consumption and
    performance issues made the VS Code team
    look for something better.

Not saying that array of lines is more performant than ropes, but just adding a datapoint here.