Most of the Roots team recommends running Trellis/Bedrock/Sage on a DO droplet. When you’re running all of the things, Trellis deploys can help take care of the asset building stuff. That’s what I was referring to the 1000%, which might be slight exaggeration.
No need to do this. Just remove https://github.com/roots/sage/blob/master/.gitignore#L3, which will check your /dist/ folder into git, which is what is needed to deploy using Git.
There are also a few deployment scripts that people like @anon66789415 have written that might be a nice springboard: WPEngine+Bedrock+Sage (https://github.com/schrapel/wpengine-bedrock-build)