I've been dealing with Webpacker for almost a year and it's been a nightmare every time I've tried to use it. And yes, I did sit down and try to figure out what the hell was going on.
Parcel is literally zero configuration, maybe that would have been a better solution for your usecase. You need to understand some Webpack basics for it to be functionally useful, but all the criticisms of Webpack could easily be levied against jQuery and some.
Vite is the way to go now, IMO. It just works and is extremely fast.