Vento includes sent me down a caching rabbit hole of my own making

I spent hours chasing down an issue in my 11ty a.k.a. Eleventy a.k.a. BuildAwesome setup, specifically during local development, which I thought was a caching issue, without knowing where: any time I would update a JS file, I’d have to stop and restart my local development server. Not the end of the world, but not great either. I precompile my JS and CSS files from an /_assets folder into an /_includes/assets folder (which makes files available to inject into templates and layouts). To prevent the files in the includes folder from triggering another “file changed” event, I ignore these files in _includes. Were I not to do this, assets will change the includes folder, which signals a file change, which triggers an assets change… and so on, ad aeternam. Hence I ignore them with eleventyConfig.watchIgnores.add(...). Okay so, what does this have to do with caching? Well, in some places, I include some JS files into my templates (usually in a bundle). These includes happen via Vento, my…