25 reasons to switch to Webpack(er)

​I've been getting this question lately in some form or another:Is webpack and Webpacker worth the hassle?It's a good question, but my short answer is yes.Given the sharp rise of mindshare in the JavaScript community in recent years, there has been a great deal of innovation in tooling, development experience, and optimization for frontend development.Rails was once at the forefront—the Rails asset pipeline was a huge leap forward when it was released—but it hasn't kept up in this department. Outsourcing JavaScript and CSS dependency management and asset bundling is smart economics at this point.In this post, I will elaborate on why I think think it's a good idea to make the switch. But this will assume some prerequisites.