If you like the "just rails" with no JS or CSS preprocessing at all (including no node dependencies), that's great.

I think that's still pretty ridiculous though.

I find that Rails+vite is a pretty nice sweet spot that really does just work. It's far far better than trying to use Rails with that "webpacker" chain or anything like that. i like that vite can do my CSS and my JS preprocessing needs, so it's just ONE thing, vite, and I'm set.

(Hypothetically you can use some light weight NPM dependencies with "just Rails" (really a weird take on importmaps, not "just rails"), but unless it's ultra simple it gets just ridiculous very quickly. Vite does not. I think the "no need for any real npm dependencies or other preprocesing of your JS, or CSS" dhh take is a weird one. Fortunately everything still works great if you agree with me.