It feels like all that I do now is fight with JavaScript tooling. Very little actual product work; just thrashing as hard as I can to stay in the same place. Maybe I should cut my losses and rebuild the entire application to render server-side and live with the UX degradation.
It turns out that the webpack watcher was working. The problem was that turning on the minifier increased the watcher& #39;s reaction time from 1.5 seconds to 26 seconds, and I didn& #39;t think to wait that long. My fault for not being more careful and patient when testing.
My frustration still stands. I need errors in user-entered code to not bubble up to onerror/unhandledrejection, and AFAICT that means inspecting the stack, which means that my error handling is sensitive to minification, which means minifying in dev to avoid dev/prod mismatch.