We discussed this a bit here: #5555 (comment)

Basically it allows for a cold start - but I also agree that it takes quite some time before building thumbnails. @mvaligursky Do you have an opinion on this?

IMO in the best case, we could build the thumbnails while not wasting any time running rollup/node processes beforehand - it's technically doable, that's why I used index.js in the example dir which linked every example. By virtue of ESM you could get a list of every example viaexport * from ... the index.js files - acting as single-source-of-truth instead of possibly outdated generated metadata files. The importmap would resolve everything in node_modules and the only thing eventually required is a npm install. I still like that idea more than making us indebted to all kinds of build scripts.

(rollup still has its place of course for generating minified builds for publishing)

Well currently this would only be required when modifying or creating new examples now since thumbnails are included in the repo itself now.

Yea having the thumbnails resolved using the imports I don't like since it splits how the example names are generated from folder and file names to the names specified in the import index.js files. One workaround would be setting file path in the config to read after the import is resolved but that seems messy.

Additionally you don't need to add example to some index file when generating a new one you can simply add the file within the specified folder.