Crazy love React, but Gatsby has just some strange air about it. Really tried to like but can't - something tells me there's a huge red flag hidden...
I mean, it's a great framework if you're building a static web page and you want the flexibility of using React. If you want to serve up dynamic apps with server rendered content, Next.js (also React based) might be a better choice. Or a traditional SPA (as shown in Create React App) is fine for a lot of use cases, too.
I agree with this. Static Blogs with Gatsby are incredible once you get past the mental overhead. I chose before hand to do static sites for my blog just for pricing and security reasons. With Gatsby you can do compile time queries to your static files through GraphQL and display content based off your files and their metadata, this means you can do things like automatic tagging and article’s in series all with mainly markdown files with metadata, the occasional React page, and some js config files.
Gatsby's founder here:
If you can articulate what makes Gatsby seem odd to you — I'd love to hear it!
FWIW, lots of people do love Gatsby so perhaps there was a misfit with what you were looking for
Our WTL Studio builder is also bootstrapped with Gatsby https://wtlstudio.com/
Although now that I see Gatsby Cloud pricing, we may want to bump our rookie numbers, too... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)