I switched my personal Jekyll site to Gatsby 2 years ago. I ran into some minor bugs and even contributed 3 PRs that got merged. I loved working with it for a few weeks. Two months after switching, it too dawned on me how over-engineered it is. I switched off of it to a custom static site generator I made (admittedly it was also over-engineered), but I'm finally back to a simple static generator called zola [1] and it feels so refreshing.
Not only is Gatsby over-engineered, it's also bloated IMO. I think one of their main selling points it that page loads seem instant. Preloading other pages in the background seems needless to me when we're talking about a simple blog. Sure, it might be good for apps, but forcing my (few) visitors to download needless mbs on desktop or mobile seems like a bad user experience to me.
I like the look of Zola, and I bookmarked it when I saw the README pick a bone with Hugo's templating engine. Take a look at the Hugo Discourse forum and I can't imagine less than 99% of the topics are about Go/Hugo templating issues. The Hugo docs basically say "we use Go's template engine, go learn that confusing shit and then we'll tell you 5 different deprecated ways to get today's date if you are enough of a masochist."
Not only is Gatsby over-engineered, it's also bloated IMO. I think one of their main selling points it that page loads seem instant. Preloading other pages in the background seems needless to me when we're talking about a simple blog. Sure, it might be good for apps, but forcing my (few) visitors to download needless mbs on desktop or mobile seems like a bad user experience to me.
[1]: https://github.com/getzola/zola