Gatsby is horrendous. I started my personal site in Gatsby, and it the dev experience was so bad I threw it all away and rewrote in HTML and a tiny bit of CSS, and deploys with shell scripts. It's super clean and maintainable and I can think about what I want on the site instead of how I can work within Gatsby's framework

I use it for my personal site and quite like it. I agree it feels overly complicated, but I like how I can build up the site with react components.

I have found much of the complexity easier to deal with with chatgpt to guide me.

Is there a better alternative that allows me to build a static site using react? One reason I picked Gatsby was so I could include interactive content from observable notebooks such as https://www.robinlinacre.com/energy-usage/

What's the new flavor of the moment?

I liked gatsby for a project a year or so back - seemed to be a very flexible and capable system.

its incredibly slow