This is ridiculous that there's no good way to have a production ready environment without all this plumbing. Redwood comes close but still missing many things.

On one hand, people underestimate the complexity of building production-ready web applications. So, any "why not just a index.html" comments show a clear lack of understanding. However, it's not /that/ complex that we couldn't have a solution to get started with best practices on an prod-ready environment in just a few clicks.