I have two applications in the wild— one a monorepo with a rails API and front end built with deploy scripts, and one with rails Webpacker. The Webpacker one feels like I have an arm tied behind my back. There’s a bunch of ‘Rails way’ extras I have to do to keep things ‘organized’, but I don’t even get proper state-maintaining hot reloading in dev. It does smooth over some rough edges (though through magic) but the next one will probably prefer the self-management strategy.