Webpacker was a wrapper for webpack, which was an attempt to make webpack easy to use but instead added unnecessary complexity.

You can use Rails with React/Vue + TypeScript pretty easily by using something like rails-esbuild or vite_ruby.

I'm currently working on a project with Rails, React, TypeScript, Vite, and InertiaJS and have been very much enjoying it, especially now that Inertia supports SSR.