Webpacker presents a more difficult OOB experience for JS Sprinkles than Sprockets did

[rmacklin]

@Fjan

I just created an empty Rails project and just find node_modules -print | wc -l gives me 18366 files!

This line reminded me of this post from the other thread discussing sprockets and webpacker:

Sprockets abandonment

A lot has been said already! I’ll add a few extra bits: If webpack becomes the one and only solution at some point, people need to fully realise the incredible number of sub-dependencies this brings in (to fully grasp it, check out this visualisation). For apps with limited front-end needs, this increases the attack surface, some would say for little benefit. I wonder if Rollup (Visualization of npm dependencies) could be used more in those cases, as pointed out recently to me by @Ken_Collins1 …

I’d not seen those visualizations of the dependency graphs before (webpack vs rollup), but we chose to use rollup instead of webpack on one of our projects in part because of its simpler domain (and also because it produced smaller javascript bundles). I know throwing another tool in the ring might not be what you’re looking for, but I can say anecdotally that we’ve had a great experience with rollup in that project.