[guitarnick]

Another advantage of developing close to plain HTML is that you’re free from the js next-shiny-thing hamster wheel.

For example, I had thought Gatsby was the hip way to create static sites in 2019. Then another comment here mentioned it’s Next.js now.

[manigandham]

Gatsby and Next.js are both site frameworks powered by React. They can both be used for static and dynamic sites with different conventions and features around routing, data management, and general app architecture.

Both are "hip" and will likely remain as the top 2 javascript based site frameworks for now, although whether you need either of them is an entirely different question.

[graphememes]

VuePress / Gridsome are taking over.

[innocentoldguy]

Which, in the JavaScript community, means they’ll be irrelevant in 3, 2, 1.

[k__]

The difference with Next.js and Gatsby seems to be that Next uses well known React idioms and Gatsby does it's own thing.

[frosted-flakes]

Next is not a static site generator, as I understand it. It's a framework for React that includes server-side rendering of HTML, among other things.