I used to be a huge fan of developing in Rails (Rails 4 days), but these days it's feeling like a drag. But since everyone is adopting Webpacker as standard in Rails, I finally decided to stop being stubborn and follow suit. The tutorials I've found suggest structuring your javascript folder with a styles directory where you put your SCSS instead of using the Asset Pipeline. Ever since then, it feels like every change I make to CSS or JS requires web packer to do its thing and then I can refresh (or use auto refresh) to see my tiny CSS change. I used to be able to change css and within a fraction of a second see changes in my browser. Now for every SCSS change, I have to wait 4-7 seconds before my browser sees the change (measured on a super fresh project with nothing but GSAP installed). My style for working on HTML css has always been write a few lines of CSS, save, cmd+tab, cmd+r, review change, quickly switch back to text editor. So I save and refresh A LOT.

This is adding countless hours to my development workflow. What am I doing wrong here? I can't imagine Rails devs are putting up with this so I must be doing something wrong.

With webpack-dev-server, it does significantly speed it up but its still 2-3 second wait time. I don't remember Asset Pipeline being that slow.