Still easier than dealing with node dependencies, webpack and co, they make me wish to write ASP with OCX components instead.

Your complaint is with Vite – famously incredibly simple and reliable to work with – using Rust, but you're bringing up webpack's complexity?

Node dependencies are fine, add an npmrc file to have it default to exact versioning and you solve 90% of common day to day problems. It's not ideal, but nor is cargo's mystery meat approach to importing optional features from packages.