I love what react does on the front end for Complex UI, but man does the tooling suck, and why the hell does it need 2mb of libs for a 'basic' app.... seriously

I love what react does on the front end for Complex UI, but man does the tooling suck, and why the hell does it need 2mb of libs for a 'basic' app.... seriously, I get that Rails is moving into it's maturity and is avoiding big breaking changes , but why can't I spin up a Hybrid React/Rails app (that's not pure API) that doesn't require jiggery pockery with webpacker? I don't know, maybe I'm just over the hill already and doing it wrong ...