Yeah migrating my Rails 5 system to Webpacker from the pipeline was not smooth and you're right, Rails ended up adopting a system that is configuration hell.
All that said - I love Stimulus.js and Webpacker now that I fought through all the insanity (Webpack configs are nightmare of splicing and trying to reference relative folders either in node_modules or some alias located... well webpack doesn't know...)
If you're on the fence, migrate the entire thing to Webpack - forcefully, with prejudice. Living in both assets pipeline and webpacker is a mental duality that don't co-mingle.
By forcefully, I mean copy/paste raw assets instead of relying on their package that sticks it into the old pipeline.
Stimulus is nutso lightweight and "just makes sense". Everything is self contained.
All that said - I love Stimulus.js and Webpacker now that I fought through all the insanity (Webpack configs are nightmare of splicing and trying to reference relative folders either in node_modules or some alias located... well webpack doesn't know...)
If you're on the fence, migrate the entire thing to Webpack - forcefully, with prejudice. Living in both assets pipeline and webpacker is a mental duality that don't co-mingle.
By forcefully, I mean copy/paste raw assets instead of relying on their package that sticks it into the old pipeline.
Stimulus is nutso lightweight and "just makes sense". Everything is self contained.