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Nope.

Webpacker is here to stay and takes about 5 minutes to understand. Might as well take advantage of it so you can quickly add complex front end components via React or whatever flavor of FE you prefer.

I agree, webpacker makes learning Rails harder. It's a shame. But learning on a non current version is a short term solution. A good tutorial, like Michael Hartl's, will get you over that hump.

I'm learning rails 6 right now for a work project, and webpacker is just broken so I can't even get hello world to work.