I think there are two great points here:
- Sprockets maintenance is not happening.
- Rails including two tools where each can do everything the other can.
The first point is entirely mea culpa. I’m being the maintainer of Sprockets for years and I inherited the project after the two original authors left it. At the time I was still doing frontend work. After I moved companies I was getting further and further aways from frontend development. This caused my motivation to work on Sprockets to drop since I was not using it anymore in our apps. All that being said, Sprockets is another example of project that could use a motivate contributor and I’m happy to support that person on this.
To the second point, I can’t speak for DHH, but my feeling as a uses is that sprockets were better for CSS and images than Webpack. That could be familiarity bias since I’m more used with Sprockets than Webpack. But, with JavaScript files, Webpack is orders of magnitude better. Our intention were to provide the best for each kind of files. But we are lacking in documentation and guidance. For example, the assets pipeline guide has no mention to Webpacker. We need to fix it. This is another place where the community can help.