One thing I thankful for though is that it gave me a new-found love for the simple and non-flashy libs/tooling.
In the end, I wound up writing my own static site generator.
https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik
You may say to yourself "So you just wrote your own Gatsby!?"
No, I didn't. I wrote a thin lib that you can register endpoints and extract them to disk. It does absolutely nothing else. The idea is that I will wrote my own markdown rendering, navigation, html/css, etc for each project. "But what about the time it takes to implement all the features you need!" The time it takes to implement these minor things take far less time in the long run, and I will never have to be in an endless fight with the tooling to get simple tree navigation. Every feature I implement is exactly what I need, no more, no less.
Sure, it isn't as cool as React, webpack, etc. But I'm a lot happier.