Should there be a way to decode JSON values of Vite-processed assets in Elm, similar to flags?

[dillonkearns]

One thing I can imagine in the future is a way to let users pass in values from Vite to a Route Module so you can load values and have them pre-processed through Vite but access the resulting values in Elm. Something like

export function loadViteAssets(route) {
  if (route === []) {
    return { myImage: import('my-image.svg') }
  }

Then in a route module, you could do Decode.field "myImage" Decode.string to get a value that is pre-processed by Vite but accessible in your route when it's loaded. Just a rough idea at this point, I'm not sure if it's a good one yet. A few implications for it:

• How does it effect the Vite build process? Does it mean that Vite needs to be run in serverless routes before rendering a page? Or could it all be done in the build process upfront? You might want to be able to load assets dynamically based on the specific route, but that would change the lifecycle of where Vite is run, which has both complexity for framework maintenance as well as a cost to the user for extra processing work when running serverless routes.
• Is this the right abstraction? Does it support common use cases? Would be worth enumerating what some of those common use cases are, such as loading an SVG asset.
• Is it a problem that this introduces an additional point of failure in the case that there is a decoding error?