Anything more complicated though, and you are better off with Vue, React, Etc
Just being able to put
<button @click.prevent="save(<%= id %>)">Save</button>
<button data-action="click->some--long--path-to#save" data-id="<%= id %>">Save</button>
save(event) {
event.preventDefault()
* If I'm keeping it simple, it's barely different than pure HTML. * Free templating * If I need Javascript (which I likely will), it's extremely easy to add anything I need.
However, I don't think React does "add some Javascript behavior to my Rails views (or backend framework equivalent)" very well (which is what I think Stimulus is trying to do). I mean you have solid support for React in the Rails ecosystem, but you turn your HTML-rendering responsibilities over to React Javascript functions.
Gatsby does some intelligent bundling so each page is pretty much self-bundled.
* Root HTML file
* Core, common JS (cached after first load)
* Page specific JS (also cached on subsequent loads)
For me, this is 257 kB uncompressed - with most of that being the Root HTML file (I realized I don't have minification or Gzip on - which takes that down substantially). Not a tiny payload, but the content is all static so the response comes back extremely quickly.
Even at slow 3G speeds, I barely get a flash. The actual page loads just about as quickly as HN.
With modern internet, the load time is nearly instant AND is literally instant on subsequent page loads (since most of the payload is locally cached).
Gatsby is geared towards building web pages, not web applications. If you're implementing Gatsby, you're building essentially HTML pages, possibly with some JS functionality.
Usually, the more interaction, the more likely it's application. The more it's just a page, the more it should be just HTML.