diff --git a/packages/compass-components/src/force-emotion-speedy.ts b/packages/compass-components/src/force-emotion-speedy.ts
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..8b7c8d74243
--- /dev/null
+++ b/packages/compass-components/src/force-emotion-speedy.ts
@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
+import { sheet } from '@leafygreen-ui/emotion';
+/**
+ * Emotion will dynamically decide which style insertion method to use based on
+ * the "env" it is built for: in "development" mode it uses a method of
+ * inserting literal style tags with css as text inside of them for every `css`
+ * method call to apply styles to the page. This method is really slow, every
+ * single style tag insertion causes style recalculation that can end up
+ * blocking the main thread for multiple seconds, when accumulated this can
+ * result in minutes of unresponsive page behavior. In "production" mode the
+ * style insertion is done using a modern JS API that doesn't result in such
+ * drastic performance issues.
+ *
+ * Specifically when embedding compass-web in mms, there is a massive
+ * performance hit that can be observed when emotion is not running in "speedy"
+ * mode, so to work around that we are always forcing emotion to enable it.
+ *
+ * Historically "speedy" mode was only active in production because editing
+ * styles in the browser devtools didn't work otherwise, nowadays there is no
+ * reason to not use it always, so there should be no downsides to doing this.
+ *
+ * See also https://github.com/10gen/compass-data-explorer/pull/11 where we
+ * already ran into a similar issue.
+ */
+sheet.speedy(true);
diff --git a/packages/compass-components/src/index.ts b/packages/compass-components/src/index.ts
index 7e4431ab956..ffacf0f8226 100644
--- a/packages/compass-components/src/index.ts
+++ b/packages/compass-components/src/index.ts
@@ -1,5 +1,10 @@
-export * from './components/leafygreen';
+// IMPORTANT: this import should always be the first one in compass-component
+// main entrypoint to ensure that emotion is reconfigured before any component
+// modules generate their stylesheets
+import './force-emotion-speedy';
+// -------------------------------
 
+export * from './components/leafygreen';
 export {
   default as emotion,
   flush,
diff --git a/packages/compass-web/scripts/sync-dist-to-mms.js b/packages/compass-web/scripts/sync-dist-to-mms.js
index cb1f3ee27e1..87ca17a4137 100644
--- a/packages/compass-web/scripts/sync-dist-to-mms.js
+++ b/packages/compass-web/scripts/sync-dist-to-mms.js
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ const fs = require('fs');
 const path = require('path');
 const child_process = require('child_process');
 const os = require('os');
+const util = require('util');
 const { debounce } = require('lodash');
 
 if (!process.env.MMS_HOME) {
@@ -58,11 +59,42 @@ const webpackWatchProcess = child_process.spawn('npm', ['run', 'watch'], {
   stdio: 'inherit',
 });
 
+const failProofRunner = () =>
+  new (class FailProofRunner extends Array {
+    append(...fns) {
+      this.push(...fns);
+      return this;
+    }
+
+    run() {
+      const errors = this.map((f) => {
+        try {
+          f();
+        } catch (e) {
+          return e;
+        }
+      }).filter((e) => e);
+
+      if (errors.length) {
+        fs.writeSync(
+          process.stdout.fd,
+          util.inspect(errors, { depth: 20 }) + '\n'
+        );
+      }
+
+      return errors.length;
+    }
+  })();
+
 function cleanup(signalName) {
-  distWatcher.close();
-  webpackWatchProcess.kill(signalName);
-  fs.cpSync(tmpDir, destDir, { recursive: true });
-  fs.rmSync(tmpDir, { recursive: true, force: true });
+  const errorCount = failProofRunner()
+    .append(() => distWatcher.close())
+    .append(() => webpackWatchProcess.kill(signalName))
+    .append(() => fs.cpSync(tmpDir, destDir, { recursive: true }))
+    .append(() => fs.rmSync(tmpDir, { recursive: true, force: true }))
+    .run();
+  fs.writeSync(process.stdout.fd, 'Exit compass-web sync...\n');
+  process.exit(errorCount);
 }
 
 for (const evt of ['SIGINT', 'SIGTERM']) {
diff --git a/packages/compass-web/webpack.config.js b/packages/compass-web/webpack.config.js
index e71d2f01f47..c76ff5cbc92 100644
--- a/packages/compass-web/webpack.config.js
+++ b/packages/compass-web/webpack.config.js
@@ -294,13 +294,6 @@ module.exports = (env, args) => {
       tls: 'commonjs2 tls',
     },
     plugins: [
-      // Always package dist with NODE_ENV set to production, otherwise @emotion
-      // dev mode behavior completely hangs code in the browser when applying
-      // dev build to locally running mms
-      new webpack.DefinePlugin({
-        'process.env.NODE_ENV': JSON.stringify('production'),
-      }),
-
       // Only applied when running webpack in --watch mode. In this mode we want
       // to constantly rebuild d.ts files when source changes, we also don't
       // want to fail and stop compilation if we failed to generate definitions