Making Sense of JavaScript in Rails: Webpack, Rollup, esbuild, and Importmaps

A practical guide to choosing a JavaScript tooling strategy in Rails, covering Webpack, Rollup, esbuild, and Importmaps. Webpack is dismissed as a legacy heavyweight, Rollup is noted as better suited for library authoring, esbuild is recommended for React/Vue/TypeScript projects due to its Go-powered speed, and Importmaps is highlighted as the Rails default for Hotwire-based apps requiring no build step or Node.js dependency. The post concludes with a simple decision rule: use esbuild for component-heavy frontends, Importmaps for standard Rails Omakase stacks.