> It's not like the previous tooling was really any easier to deal with. If you really understood the previous tooling, that probably explains why you have the

> It's not like the previous tooling was really any easier to deal with. If you really understood the previous tooling, that probably explains why you have the mental models in place to understand what webpacker is doing with increasing automation. Say, if you were using babel without webpacker already. For people who skipped that or came to JS in webpacker era (myself included), it's hard to understand what is going on. the universe of what webpacker does seems inconsistent and random and involves concepts underlying concepts underlying concepts where it seems like you need to understand the mysterious base to understand what the top-level tool is doing before forgetting it and letting the tool do it for you. But webpacker isn't just insane, it is what it is for a reason, involving solving specific problems that were in existence in previous ways of doing things. If you had those problems personally... it's a lot easier to make sense of it. I assume/sense. I don't know this from personal experience with webpacker... but it's a familiar sort of situation with software development technology.