Happy to discuss all the concrete proposals on how to make things better. Right now Webpacker provides a out of the box experience where all the major stuff just works. Yes, that requires a shit ton of dependencies, but that’s only on the dev side. We use more-or-less vanilla Webpacker at Basecamp, but that’s just such that we get proper transpiling. Our actual dependencies in terms of what we ship is tiny, because we just use Turbolinks/Stimulus/etc. No React/Vue/Whatever.
I don’t think there’s any future in making Sprockets work with modern JavaScript. That ship has sailed. That’s why we’re on Webpack! But until Webpack provides a superior experience for css/images/fonts/whatever, Sprockets is great.
Don’t really give much a hoot of “image” problems. We diagnose problems, device solutions, and then if that appeals, great, and if it doesn’t appeal, also great 
.