Missing The Simplicity of Rails Assets (A Small Rant)

I recently started a new Rails project, and once again I ran into something that always bugs me: the modern CSS & JS build pipeline. Back in the old Rails days, you could get very far with Sprockets. You dropped your CSS files into app/assets/stylesheets, required them via manifest files, and that was it. No NPM, no package.json, no node_modules to manage, no build steps to debug. Things just…