you might be interested in https://inertiajs.com/ if you're using rails (or laravel) - doesn't solve SSR if needed, but in my limited use does provide a nice middle ground for not needing to go full SPA
editing to add: https://laravel-mix.com/ is a nice wrapper around some common webpack setup gotchas, despite having laravel in the name it's just regular old webpack (other than the default output directories)...https://luckyframework.org uses it as well