Ik this is old but you mentioned wanting to incorporate GitHub and Netlify with your dist folder only. I think you could accomplish this by using branch deploys. So your master/main would be the dist folder contents only (make sure there’s and index.html at the root) and the other branches would be your dev environments.
Then you can set-up a netlify.toml with custom build commands. In my one below, the build command is for the branch maps is just true. Netlify would see this and not do anything, just deploy the files on that branch. It currently works really well for a site of mine.
[build]
command="npm run generate --modern"
[context.master]
publish = "dist"
[context.developer]
publish = "dist"
[context.maps]
command = "true"
You need to clear out any build commands on the webGUI for this to work. You can see how we got here on this question