[timdorr]

I would definitely advise against webpacker. It's very much the case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The two don't work all that well together, despite the pretty heroic work done by the webpacker team.

For an "idiot proof", batteries included, zero config approach, I would try out Parcel: https://parceljs.org/getting_started.html You just pass it an HTML file and it figures out what it needs to build from there. You can drop everything in /public/ and it all just works without any additional installs or fiddling. It works with pretty much anything you might drop in as an asset, whether it's via HTML tag or import statement.

As a close second, you can try esbuild: https://esbuild.github.io/ It's coming along and already does a lot of what you might do with Parcel or Webpack, but is stupendously fast. Fast enough that you'd need to be shipping an obscene amount of code to the browser to have build times exceed 1 second. It's a little more quirky right now, but I like it and appreciate the forward momentum it has right now.