It is just a static website for crying out loud.

But once I got around it, it gave me a score of 100 in performance and 80 in SEO just out of the box. Images are resized and inlined if need be; critical CSS is rendered first; the plugins added niceties like default anchor link in Github. And I could use React components to organize everything, which is a much more ergonomic way of doing reusable markup compared to server-side things like Rails partials.

I would've needed to spend weeks if I had to get here from scratch. Gatsby is bleeding edge and it does best practices - including performance better than most other static site generators. I think the web is only moving forward - there is cambrian explosion of new untested and often ill-thought ideas, but the good ones will survive in the long run.