> May be Rails should take a look as well.

I don't know what's involved with Laravel's front-end stuff but Rails is using https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails which lets you pick whichever front-end tool you want to use that's supported (esbuild + webpack + rollup at the moment). You're no longer bound to a specific tool that's been modified to work with Rails like the old Webpacker, instead you can use the native tool with its native configuration. Although DHH has already given an opinion on not adding Vite support in https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails/issues/25#issuecom..., but there is third party support for it at https://vite-ruby.netlify.app/guide/introduction.html.

Technically the Rails default is not to use any of that and instead you can use a Node-less import maps solution (personally I've gone with esbuild because there's certain things you can't do with Tailwind's pre-built binary).

esbuild with Rails 7 is extremely easy nowadays. It's pretty much running a single esbuild command with a couple of flags, there's not even a config file you need to mess around with.

They did the same thing with css with https://github.com/rails/cssbundling-rails, there's tailwind, bootstrap, bulma, postcss and dart sass that works out of the box all with their native configuration.

It's the best of both worlds. You have flexibility in being able to pick whatever you want but Rails pulls it all together to make using them easy without breaking away from using the native tool's configuration.