We do use sprite sheets for almost all of the icon-sized images (there are hundreds) in the application. And those sprite sheets are big enough to not get inlined in the CSS. The images that do get inlined are generally odd-sized--though I suppose that automatically generated sprite sheets could manage that for us as well.

Exposing CSS is much less of an issue than exposing Javascript; that list was speaking about JS and CSS generally ("why a build process"). The post goes on to describe why CSS specifically is worth paying attention to.