> We've recently moved one service from next to Astro and it was just removing a ton of boilerplate and 'dance around' code.
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> And I get why it happens. When you first try out a new framework, you allow yourself to learn and add its inherent complexity, knowingly and intentionally. You say to yourself, "it's part of the dream, it's going to work out; there's a vision, just trust the process." This is true with literally all frameworks.
I am quite picky and have strong opinions. I've used Astro for more than a year and still love it. There is complexity (especially if you use SSR), but for the use case of "I just want a static site" it is wonderful.
> Look at the code on vanillajsx.com. Besides JSX and types, it's plain JavaScript and DOM manipulation. Translating it to document.createElement would add almost no lines of code. There's no unnecessary complexity. That's the whole point of the site. The simplicity of discovering and removing unnecessary complexity is wonderful and refreshing, and I think a lot of people agree.
I don't disagree, but this doesn't replace what you might want for SSG. For one, this requires JS on the client. Astro compiles to static HTML despite using JSX-like syntax.
As an example, here's my Astro site and source code: