[nogabebop23]

>> Static site generators output static HTML files

This is not really true; they often generate a static client-side web application vs. a dynamic first-time (or every time) app based on server-side processing. This provides a highly optimized, largely self-contained application that avoids a lot of the runtime dependencies and complexity we typically get (ex: web servers and databases). They are still highly dynamic through the use of APIs and such.

Gatsby has an extensive build pipeline and can query almost any data source during the build, but the original base source is markdown, and react is the Javascript.