Many modern websites give users the power to set a site-specific color scheme preference. A basic implementation is straightforward with JavaScript: listen for when a user changes a checkbox or clicks a button, toggle a class (or attribute) on the element in response, and write the styles for that class to override design with a different color scheme.

CSS’s new :has() pseudo-class, supported by major browsers since December 2023, opens many doors for front-end developers. I’m especially excited about leveraging it to modify UI in response to user interaction without JavaScript. Where previously we have used JavaScript to toggle classes or attributes (or to set styles directly), we can now pair :has() selectors with HTML’s native interactive elements.

Supporting a color scheme preference, like “Dark Mode,” is a great use case. We can use a element anywhere that toggles color schemes based on the selected — no JavaScript needed, save for a sprinkle to save the user’s choice, which we’ll get to further in.

Respecting System Preferences

First, we’ll support a user’s system-wide color scheme preferences by adopting a “Light Mode”-first approach. In other words, we start with a light color scheme by default and swap it out for a dark color scheme for users who prefer it.

The prefers-color-scheme media feature detects the user’s system preference. Wrap “dark” styles in a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

selector {
  /* light styles */

  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    /* dark styles */
  }
}

Next, set the color-scheme property to match the preferred color scheme. Setting color-scheme: dark switches the browser into its built-in dark mode, which includes a black default background, white default text, “dark” styles for scrollbars, and other elements that are difficult to target with CSS, and more. I’m using CSS variables to hint that the value is dynamic — and because I like the browser developer tools experience — but plain color-scheme: light and color-scheme: dark would work fine.

:root {
  /* light styles here */
  color-scheme: var(--color-scheme, light);
  
  /* system preference is "dark" */
  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    --color-scheme: dark;
    /* any additional dark styles here */
  }
}

Giving Users Control

Now, to support overriding the system preference, let users choose between light (default) and dark color schemes at the page level.

HTML has native elements for handling user interactions. Using one of those controls, rather than, say, a

nest, improves the chances that assistive tech users will have a good experience. I’ll use a menu with options for “system,” “light,” and “dark.” A group of would work, too, if you wanted the options right on the surface instead of a dropdown menu.

  System
  Light
  Dark

Before CSS gained :has(), responding to the user’s selected required JavaScript, for example, setting an event listener on the to toggle a class or attribute on or .

But now that we have :has(), we can now do this with CSS alone! You’ll save spending any of your performance budget on a dark mode script, plus the control will work even for users who have disabled JavaScript. And any “no-JS” folks on the project will be satisfied.

What we need is a selector that applies to the page when it :has() a select menu with a particular [value]:checked. Let’s translate that into CSS:

:root:has(select option[value="dark"]:checked)

We’re defaulting to a light color scheme, so it’s enough to account for two possible dark color scheme scenarios:

1. The page-level color preference is “system,” and the system-level preference is “dark.”
2. The page-level color preference is “dark”.

The first one is a page-preference-aware iteration of our prefers-color-scheme: dark case. A “dark” system-level preference is no longer enough to warrant dark styles; we need a “dark” system-level preference and a “follow the system-level preference” at the page-level preference. We’ll wrap the prefers-color-scheme media query dark scheme styles with the :has() selector we just wrote:

:root {
  /* light styles here */
  color-scheme: var(--color-scheme, light);
    
  /* page preference is "system", and system preference is "dark" */
  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    &:has(#color-scheme option[value="system"]:checked) {
      --color-scheme: dark;
      /* any additional dark styles, again */
    }
  }
}

Notice that I’m using CSS Nesting in that last snippet. Baseline 2023 has it pegged as “Newly available across major browsers” which means support is good, but at the time of writing, support on Android browsers not included in Baseline’s core browser set is limited. You can get the same result without nesting.

:root {
  /* light styles */
  color-scheme: var(--color-scheme, light);
    
  /* page preference is "dark" */
  &:has(#color-scheme option[value="dark"]:checked) {
    --color-scheme: dark;
    /* any additional dark styles */
  }
}

For the second dark mode scenario, we’ll use nearly the exact same :has() selector as we did for the first scenario, this time checking whether the “dark” option — rather than the “system” option — is selected:

:root {
  /* light styles */
  color-scheme: var(--color-scheme, light);
    
  /* page preference is "dark" */
  &:has(#color-scheme option[value="dark"]:checked) {
    --color-scheme: dark;
    /* any additional dark styles */
  }
    
  /* page preference is "system", and system preference is "dark" */
  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    &:has(#color-scheme option[value="system"]:checked) {
      --color-scheme: dark;
      /* any additional dark styles, again */
    }
  }
}

Now the page’s styles respond to both changes in users’ system settings and user interaction with the page’s color preference UI — all with CSS!

But the colors change instantly. Let’s smooth the transition.

Respecting Motion Preferences

Instantaneous style changes can feel inelegant in some cases, and this is one of them. So, let’s apply a CSS transition on the :root to “ease” the switch between color schemes. (Transition styles at the :root will cascade down to the rest of the page, which may necessitate adding transition: none or other transition overrides.)

Note that the CSS color-scheme property does not support transitions.

:root {
  transition-duration: 200ms;
  transition-property: /* properties changed by your light/dark styles */;
}

Not all users will consider the addition of a transition a welcome improvement. Querying the prefers-reduced-motion media feature allows us to account for a user’s motion preferences. If the value is set to reduce, then we remove the transition-duration to eliminate unwanted motion.

:root {
  transition-duration: 200ms;
  transition-property: /* properties changed by your light/dark styles */;
    
  @media screen and (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
    transition-duration: none;
  }
}

Transitions can also produce poor user experiences on devices that render changes slowly, for example, ones with e-ink screens. We can extend our “no motion condition” media query to account for that with the update media feature. If its value is slow, then we remove the transition-duration.

:root {
  transition-duration: 200ms;
  transition-property: /* properties changed by your light/dark styles */;
    
  @media screen and (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce), (update: slow) {
    transition-duration: 0s;
  }
}

Let’s try out what we have so far in the following demo. Notice that, to work around color-scheme’s lack of transition support, I’ve explicitly styled the properties that should transition during theme changes.

Not bad! But what happens if the user refreshes the pages or navigates to another page? The reload effectively wipes out the user’s form selection, forcing the user to re-make the selection. That may be acceptable in some contexts, but it’s likely to go against user expectations. Let’s bring in JavaScript for a touch of progressive enhancement in the form of…

Persistence

Here’s a vanilla JavaScript implementation. It’s a naive starting point — the functions and variables aren’t encapsulated but are instead properties on window. You’ll want to adapt this in a way that fits your site’s conventions, framework, library, and so on.

When the user changes the color scheme from the menu, we’ll store the selected value in a new localStorage item called "preferredColorScheme". On subsequent page loads, we’ll check localStorage for the "preferredColorScheme" item. If it exists, and if its value corresponds to one of the form control options, we restore the user’s preference by programmatically updating the menu selection.

/*
 * If a color scheme preference was previously stored,
 * select the corresponding option in the color scheme preference UI
 * unless it is already selected.
 */
function restoreColorSchemePreference() {
  const colorScheme = localStorage.getItem(colorSchemeStorageItemName);

  if (!colorScheme) {
    // There is no stored preference to restore
    return;
  }

  const option = colorSchemeSelectorEl.querySelector(`[value=${colorScheme}]`);  

  if (!option) {
    // The stored preference has no corresponding option in the UI.
    localStorage.removeItem(colorSchemeStorageItemName);
    return;
  }

  if (option.selected) {  
    // The stored preference's corresponding menu option is already selected
    return;
  }

  option.selected = true;
}

/*
 * Store an event target's value in localStorage under colorSchemeStorageItemName
 */
function storeColorSchemePreference({ target }) {
  const colorScheme = target.querySelector(":checked").value;
  localStorage.setItem(colorSchemeStorageItemName, colorScheme);
}

// The name under which the user's color scheme preference will be stored.
const colorSchemeStorageItemName = "preferredColorScheme";

// The color scheme preference front-end UI.
const colorSchemeSelectorEl = document.querySelector("#color-scheme");

if (colorSchemeSelectorEl) {
  restoreColorSchemePreference();

  // When the user changes their color scheme preference via the UI,
  // store the new preference.
  colorSchemeSelectorEl.addEventListener("input", storeColorSchemePreference);
}

Let’s try that out. Open this demo (perhaps in a new window), use the menu to change the color scheme, and then refresh the page to see your preference persist:

If your system color scheme preference is “light” and you set the demo’s color scheme to “dark,” you may get the light mode styles for a moment immediately after reloading the page before the dark mode styles kick in. That’s because CodePen loads its own JavaScript before the demo’s scripts. That is out of my control, but you can take care to improve this persistence on your projects.

Persistence Performance Considerations

Where things can get tricky is restoring the user’s preference immediately after the page loads. If the color scheme preference in localStorage is different from the user’s system-level color scheme preference, it’s possible the user will see the system preference color scheme before the page-level preference is restored. (Users who have selected the “System” option will never get that flash; neither will those whose system settings match their selected option in the form control.)

If your implementation is showing a “flash of inaccurate color theme”, where is the problem happening? Generally speaking, the earlier the scripts appear on the page, the lower the risk. The “best option” for you will depend on your specific stack, of course.

What About Browsers That Don’t Support :has()?

All major browsers support :has() today Lean into modern platforms if you can. But if you do need to consider legacy browsers, like Internet Explorer, there are two directions you can go: either hide or remove the color scheme picker for those browsers or make heavier use of JavaScript.

If you consider color scheme support itself a progressive enhancement, you can entirely hide the selection UI in browsers that don’t support :has():

@supports not selector(:has(body)) {
  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    :root {
      /* dark styles here */
    }
  }

  #color-scheme {
    display: none;
  }
}

Otherwise, you’ll need to rely on a JavaScript solution not only for persistence but for the core functionality. Go back to that traditional event listener toggling a class or attribute.

The CSS-Tricks “Complete Guide to Dark Mode” details several alternative approaches that you might consider as well when working on the legacy side of things.

(gg, yk)

A fun fact about me is that my birthday is on Valentine’s Day. This year, I wanted to celebrate by launching a simple website that lets people receive anonymous letters through a personal link. The idea came up to me at the beginning of February, so I wanted to finish the project as soon as possible since time was of the essence.

Having that in mind, I decided not to do SSR/SSG with Gatsby for the project but rather go with a single-page application (SPA) using Vite and React — a rather hard decision considering my extensive experience with Gatsby. Years ago, when I started using React and learning more and more about today’s intricate web landscape, I picked up Gatsby.js as my render framework of choice because SSR/SSG was necessary for every website, right?

I used it for everything, from the most basic website to the most over-engineered project. I absolutely loved it and thought it was the best tool, and I was incredibly confident in my decision since I was getting perfect Lighthouse scores in the process.

The years passed, and I found myself constantly fighting with Gatsby plugins, resorting to hacky solutions for them and even spending more time waiting for the server to start. It felt like I was fixing more than making. I even started a series for this magazine all about the “Gatsby headaches” I experienced most and how to overcome them.

It was like Gatsby got tougher to use with time because of lots of unaddressed issues: outdated dependencies, cold starts, slow builds, and stale plugins, to name a few. Starting a Gatsby project became tedious for me, and perfect Lighthouse scores couldn’t make up for that.

So, I’ve decided to stop using Gatsby as my go-to framework.

To my surprise, the Vite + React combination I mentioned earlier turned out to be a lot more efficient than I expected while maintaining almost the same great performance measures as Gatsby. It’s a hard conclusion to stomach after years of Gatsby’s loyalty.

I mean, I still think Gatsby is extremely useful for plenty of projects, and I plan on talking about those in a bit. But Gatsby has undergone a series of recent unfortunate events after Netlify acquired it, the impacts of which can be seen in down-trending results from the most recent State of JavaScript survey. The likelihood of a developer picking up Gatsby again after using it for other projects plummeted from 89% to a meager 38% between 2019 and 2022 alone.

Although Gatsby was still the second most-used rendering framework as recently as 2022 — we are still expecting results from the 2023 survey — my prediction is that the decline will continue and dip well below 38%.

Seeing as this is my personal farewell to Gatsby, I wanted to write about where, in my opinion, it went wrong, where it is still useful, and how I am handling my future projects.

Gatsby: A Retrospective

Kyle Mathews started working on what would eventually become Gatsby in late 2015. Thanks to its unique data layer and SSG approach, it was hyped for success and achieved a $3.8 million funding seed round in 2018. Despite initial doubts, Gatsby remained steadfast in its commitment and became a frontrunner in the Jamstack community by consistently enhancing its open-source framework and bringing new and better changes with each version.

So… where did it all go wrong?

I’d say it was the introduction of Gatsby Cloud in 2019, as Gatsby aimed at generating continuous revenue and solidifying its business model. Many (myself included) pinpoint Gatsby’s downfall to Gatsby Cloud, as it would end up cutting resources from the main framework and even making it harder to host in other cloud providers.

The core framework had been optimized in a way that using Gatsby and Gatsby Cloud together required no additional hosting configurations, which, as a consequence, made deployments in other platforms much more difficult, both by neglecting to provide documentation for third-party deployments and by releasing exclusive features, like incremental builds, that were only available to Gatsby users who had committed to using Gatsby Cloud. In short, hosting projects on anything but Gatsby Cloud felt like a penalty.

As a framework, Gatsby lost users to Next.js, as shown in both surveys and npm trends, while Gatsby Cloud struggled to compete with the likes of Vercel and Netlify; the former acquiring Gatsby in February of 2023.

“It [was] clear after a while that [Gatsby] weren’t winning the framework battle against Vercel, as a general purpose framework […] And they were probably a bit boxed in by us in terms of building a cloud platform.”

— Matt Biilmann, Netlify CEO

The Netlify acquisition was the last straw in an already tumbling framework haystack. The migration from Gatsby Cloud to Netlify wasn’t pretty for customers either; some teams were charged 120% more — or had incurred extraneous fees — after converting from Gatsby Cloud to Netlify, even with the same Gatsby Cloud plan they had! Many key Gatsby Cloud features, specifically incremental builds that reduced build times of small changes from minutes to seconds, were simply no longer available in Netlify, despite Kyle Mathews saying they would be ported over to Netlify:

“Many performance innovations specifically for large, content-heavy websites, preview, and collaboration workflows, will be incorporated into the Netlify platform and, where relevant, made available across frameworks.”

— Kyle Mathews

However, in a Netlify forum thread dated August 2023, a mere six months after the acquisition, a Netlify support engineer contradicted Mathews’s statement, saying there were no plans to add incremental features in Netlify.

That left no significant reason to remain with Gatsby. And I think this comment on the same thread perfectly sums up the community’s collective sentiment:

“Yikes. Huge blow to Gatsby Cloud customers. The incremental build speed was exactly why we switched from Netlify to Gatsby Cloud in the first place. It’s really unfortunate to be forced to migrate while simultaneously introducing a huge regression in performance and experience.”

Netlify’s acquisition also brought about a company restructuring that substantially reduced the headcount of Gatsby’s engineering team, followed by a complete stop in commit activities. A report in an ominous tweet by Astro co-founder Fred Schott further exacerbated concerns about Gatsby’s future.

Lennart Jörgens, former full-stack developer at Gatsby and Netlify, replied, insinuating there was only one person left after the layoffs:

You can see all these factors contributing to Gatsby’s usage downfall in the 2023 Stack Overflow survey.

Biilmann addressed the community’s concerns about Gatsby’s viability in an open issue from the Gatsby repository:

“While we don’t plan for Gatsby to be where the main innovation in the framework ecosystem takes place, it will be a safe, robust and reliable choice to build production quality websites and e-commerce stores, and will gain new powers by ways of great complementary tools.”

— Matt Biilmann

He also shed light on Gatsby’s future focus:

• “First, ensure stability, predictability, and good performance.
• Second, give it new powers by strong integration with all new tooling that we add to our Composable Web Platform (for more on what’s all that, you can check out our homepage).
• Third, make Gatsby more open by decoupling some parts of it that were closely tied to proprietary cloud infrastructure. The already-released Adapters feature is part of that effort.”

— Matt Biilmann

So, Gatsby gave up competing against Next.js on innovation, and instead, it will focus on keeping the existing framework clean and steady in its current state. Frankly, this seems like the most reasonable course of action considering today’s state of affairs.

Why Did People Stop Using Gatsby?

Yes, Gatsby Cloud ended abruptly, but as a framework independent of its cloud provider, other aspects encouraged developers to look for alternatives to Gatsby.

As far as I am concerned, Gatsby’s developer experience (DX) became more of a burden than a help, and there are two main culprits where I lay the blame: dependency hell and slow bundling times.

Dependency Hell

Go ahead and start a new Gatsby project:

gatsby new

After waiting a couple of minutes you will get your brand new Gatsby site. You’d rightly expect to have a clean slate with zero vulnerabilities and outdated dependencies with this out-of-the-box setup, but here’s what you will find in the terminal once you run npm audit:

18 vulnerabilities (11 moderate, 6 high, 1 critical)

That looks concerning — and it is — not so much from a security perspective but as an indication of decaying DX. As a static site generator (SSG), Gatsby will, unsurprisingly, deliver a static and safe site that (normally) doesn’t have access to a database or server, making it immune to most cyber attacks. Besides, lots of those vulnerabilities are in the developer tools and never reach the end user. Alas, relying on npm audit to assess your site security is a naive choice at best.

However, those vulnerabilities reveal an underlying issue: the whopping number of dependencies Gatsby uses is 168(!) at the time I’m writing this. For the sake of comparison, Next.js uses 16 dependencies. A lot of Gatsby’s dependencies are outdated, hence the warnings, but trying to update them to their latest versions will likely unleash a dependency hell full of additional npm warnings and errors.

In a related subreddit from 2022, a user asked, “Is it possible to have a Gatsby site without vulnerabilities?”

The real answer is disappointing, but as of March 2024, it remains true.

A Gatsby site should work completely fine, even with that many dependencies, and extending your project shouldn’t be a problem, whether through its plugin ecosystem or other packages. However, when trying to upgrade any existing dependency you will find that you can’t! Or at least you can’t do it without introducing breaking changes to one of the 168 dependencies, many of which rely on outdated versions of other libraries that also cannot be updated.

It’s that inception-like roundabout of dependencies that I call dependency hell.

Slow Build And Development Times

To me, one of the most important aspects of choosing a development tool is how comfortable it feels to use it and how fast it is to get a project up and running. As I’ve said before, users don’t care or know what a “tech stack” is or what framework is in use; they want a good-looking website that helps them achieve the task they came for. Many developers don’t even question what tech stack is used on each site they visit; at least, I hope not.

With that in mind, choosing a framework boils down to how efficiently you can use it. If your development server constantly experiences cold starts and crashes and is unable to quickly reflect changes, that’s a poor DX and a signal that there may be a better option.

That’s the main reason I won’t automatically reach for Gatsby from here on out. Installation is no longer a trivial task; the dependencies are firing off warnings, and it takes the development server upwards of 30 seconds to boot. I’ve even found that the longer the server runs, the slower it gets; this happens constantly to me, though I admittedly have not heard similar gripes from other developers. Regardless, I get infuriated having to constantly restart my development server every time I make a change to gatsby-config.js, gatsby-node.js files, or any other data source.

This new reality is particularly painful, knowing that a Vite.js + React setup can start a server within 500ms thanks to the use of esbuild.

Running gatsby build gets worse. Build times for larger projects normally take some number of minutes, which is understandable when we consider all of the pages, data sources, and optimizations Gatsby does behind the scenes. However, even a small content edit to a page triggers a full build and deployment process, and the endless waiting is not only exhausting but downright distracting for getting things done. That’s what incremental builds were designed to solve and the reason many people switched from Netlify to Gatsby Cloud when using Gatsby. It’s a shame we no longer have that as an available option.

The moment Gatsby Cloud was discontinued along with incremental builds, the incentives for continuing to use Gatsby became pretty much non-existent. The slow build times are simply too costly to the development workflow.

What Gatsby Did Awesomely Well

I still believe that Gatsby has awesome things that other rendering frameworks don’t, and that’s why I will keep using it, albeit for specific cases, such as my personal website. It just isn’t my go-to framework for everything, mainly because Gatsby (and the Jamstack) wasn’t meant for every project, even if Gatsby was marketed as a general-purpose framework.

Here’s where I see Gatsby still leading the competition:

• The GraphQL data layer.
  In Gatsby, all the configured data is available in the same place, a data layer that’s easy to access using GraphQL queries in any part of your project. This is by far the best Gatsby feature, and it trivializes the process of building static pages from data, e.g., a blog from a content management system API or documentation from Markdown files.
• Client performance.
  While Gatsby’s developer experience is questionable, I believe it delivers one of the best user experiences for navigating a website. Static pages and assets deliver the fastest possible load times, and using React Router with pre-rendering of proximate links offers one of the smoothest experiences navigating between pages. We also have to note Gatsby’s amazing image API, which optimizes images to all extents.
• The plugin ecosystem (kinda).
  There is typically a Gatsby plugin for everything. This is awesome when using a CMS as a data source since you could just install its specific plugin and have all the necessary data in your data layer. However, a lot of plugins went unmaintained and grew outdated, introducing unsolvable dependency issues that come with dependency hell.

I briefly glossed over the good parts of Gatsby in contrast to the bad parts. Does that mean that Gatsby has more bad parts? Absolutely not; you just won’t find the bad parts in any documentation. The bad parts also aren’t deal breakers in isolation, but they snowball into a tedious and lengthy developer experience that pushes away its advocates to other solutions or rendering frameworks.

Do We Need SSR/SSG For Everything?

I’ll go on record saying that I am not replacing Gatsby with another rendering framework, like Next.js or Remix, but just avoiding them altogether. I’ve found they aren’t actually needed in a lot of cases.

Think, why do we use any type of rendering framework in the first place? I’d say it’s for two main reasons: crawling bots and initial loading time.

SEO And Crawling Bots

Most React apps start with a hollow body, only having an empty

alongside tags. The JavaScript code then runs in the browser, where React creates the Virtual DOM and injects the rendered user interface into the browser.

Over slow networks, users may notice a white screen before the page is actually rendered, which is just mildly annoying at best (but devastating at worst).

However, search engines like Google and Bing deploy bots that only see an empty page and decide not to crawl the content. Or, if you are linking up a post on social media, you may not get OpenGraph benefits like a link preview.

This was the case years ago, making SSR/SSG necessary for getting noticed by Google bots. Nowadays, Google can run JavaScript and render the content to crawl your website. While using SSR or SSG does make this process faster, not all bots can run JavaScript. It’s a tradeoff you can make for a lot of projects and one you can minimize on your cloud provider by pre-rendering your content.

Initial Loading Time

Pre-rendered pages load faster since they deliver static content that relieves the browser from having to run expensive JavaScript.

It’s especially useful when loading pages that are behind authentication; in a client-side rendered (CSR) page, we would need to display a loading state while we check if the user is logged in, while an SSR page can perform the check on the server and send back the correct static content. I have found, however, that this trade-off is an uncompelling argument for using a rendering framework over a CSR React app.

In any case, my SPA built on React + Vite.js gave me a perfect Lighthouse score for the landing page. Pages that fetch data behind authentication resulted in near-perfect Core Web Vitals scores.

What Projects Gatsby Is Still Good For

Gatsby and rendering frameworks are excellent for programmatically creating pages from data and, specifically, for blogs, e-commerce, and documentation.

Don’t be disappointed, though, if it isn’t the right tool for every use case, as that is akin to blaming a screwdriver for not being a good hammer. It still has good uses, though fewer than it could due to all the reasons we discussed before.

But Gatsby is still a useful tool. If you are a Gatsby developer the main reason you’d reach for it is because you know Gatsby. Not using it might be considered an opportunity cost in economic terms:

“Opportunity cost is the value of the next-best alternative when a decision is made; it’s what is given up.”

Imagine a student who spends an hour and $30 attending a yoga class the evening before a deadline. The opportunity cost encompasses the time that could have been dedicated to completing the project and the $30 that could have been used for future expenses.

As a Gatsby developer, I could start a new project using another rendering framework like Next.js. Even if Next.js has faster server starts, I would need to factor in my learning curve to use it as efficiently as I do Gatsby. That’s why, for my latest project, I decided to avoid rendering frameworks altogether and use Vite.js + React — I wanted to avoid the opportunity cost that comes with spending time learning how to use an “unfamiliar” framework.

Conclusion

So, is Gatsby dead? Not at all, or at least I don’t think Netlify will let it go away any time soon. The acquisition and subsequent changes to Gatsby Cloud may have taken a massive toll on the core framework, but Gatsby is very much still breathing, even if the current slow commits pushed to the repo look like it’s barely alive or hibernating.

I will most likely stick to Vite.js + React for my future endeavors and only use rendering frameworks when I actually need them. What are the tradeoffs? Sacrificing negligible page performance in favor of a faster and more pleasant DX that maintains my sanity? I’ll take that deal every day.

And, of course, this is my experience as a long-time Gatsby loyalist. Your experience is likely to differ, so the mileage of everything I’m saying may vary depending on your background using Gatsby on your own projects.

That’s why I’d love for you to comment below: if you see it differently, please tell me! Is your current experience using Gatsby different, better, or worse than it was a year ago? What’s different to you, if anything? It would be awesome to get other perspectives in here, perhaps from someone who has been involved in maintaining the framework.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

• Gatsby Headaches And How To Cure Them: i18n (Part 1)
• Gatsby Headaches And How To Cure Them: i18n (Part 2)
• Gatsby Headaches: Working With Media (Part 1)
• Gatsby Headaches: Working With Media (Part 2)

(gg, yk)