> The moment you want to rely on a JavaScript library or generate some CSS you pretty much have to pull in Node and NPM because there just so much value in those ecosystems.

Perhaps I'm missing details here but isn't that a reality with non-js web frameworks? The Phoenix docs mention esbuild and npm right off the bat:

https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/asset_management.html

Laravel expects node, npm, and vite at the very least:

https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/vite