> Any web application with a UI _requires_ a frontend build for CSS/JS.

Except it really doesn't. Core web technologies have gotten so much better since the jQuery/pre-SASS days that you can absolutely get by without a build step.

- http/2 makes bundling a questionable choice

- polyfills are pretty much no longer a thing

- CSS now has most (all?) of the features that people used SASS for (variables, nesting, etc.)

- es6 modules work

This has been a big talking point in the Rails community lately — one of the big selling points of Rails 8 was the fact that you can, by default, ship a whole webapp without a build step, and that this is considered the "happy path".