Web Front-End Stack is Ancient

[ctm]

Research alternatives and switch from yarn dev and yarn build.

Our front-end stack started using webpack via yarn on March 4th, 2020 or earlier. That is no longer a recommended way of doing things and probably hasn't been for years. That is probably why the new default use of reference types isn't biting other developers, but it is biting us (#1503).

In researching how to disable reference types, I tried to find a repo for whatever template that I used to get started to see how it's been updated to address this issue and four years in the Rust wasm ecosystem is like a decade or more. My guess is I should simply start at the wasm-pack home page and go from there.

I use trunk for proof-of-concept work, so I should look at it too. However, searching for npm in the Trunk Guide produces no hits, so I don't know how I'd glue in uikit and dragee, neither of which I can remove quickly.

I'm starting this one out with easy, but I won't really know until I explore more. We don't currently do anything particularly strange AFAIK, but there's a lot to forget in four years.

[ctm]

Ugh.

The wam-pack guide points to rust-webpack-template which itself is older than my stack. It uses npm instead of yarn, but yarn is/was a more modern (but npm-compatible) package manager than npm. Underneath, it's probably invoking the same node modules which will presumably fail due to reference types and will (again, presumably) have the same inscrutability problem w.r.t. disabling reference types.

Furthermore, I looked at trunk some more and in addition to not finding a way to integrate node modules, there doesn't appear to be a way to turn SVG files into data-uris. In fact, from my perspective, it looks like various asset building aspects of trunk that had been discussed in 2020 haven't turned into a general purpose solution.

I'll probably hop on the Yew discord and ask around to see if there's anyone out there like myself who uses wam-pack and can't figure out how to turn off reference types.

[ctm]

I did a bunch of searching on the Yew discord and didn't see anyone running into the problem and very few people using wasm-pack. I think the bug reporting that I'm going to be doing as part of #1503 is the best way to proceed.