Yes this article is written for people not using Rails & Sprockets. Pretty amazing the best practices that Rails asset pipeline enforces. It will also concatenate the JS & CSS files to reduce HTTP requests and does automatic .gz files on disk. When used with asset_sync gem it can also push these to S3 or your CDN to avoid your web server altogether.
In Python world we have webassets[1] that does something similar (to Jammit, anyway). It is a little bit more complicated to use than Sprockets but I'd argue that it is also a bit more flexible. (Thanks to filters chaining e.g. compile SASS, merge them, add vendor prefixes, optimize, compress then Gzip as a single chain.)