Every web developer in the 2000s was a PHP dev. To a man with a PHP hammer, everything looks like a PHP nail. Hence Wordpress (although, I must admit Wordpress's plugin ecosystem was genius).
Every web developer in 2020 is a React dev. To a man with a React hammer, everything looks like a React nail. Hence, Gatsby.
In neither case did it really make sense to build simple marketing sites and blogs with those technologies, they are best suited for dynamic web apps.
But, the technology that all the devs want to put on their resumes will ultimately end up powering everything. Common sense be damned.
After the static site hype dies down I am hopeful that Webflow will become the defacto solution for marketing/blog sites going forward and the design/marketing teams can fully own them and manage all changes. I'd be happy if I never had to touch another marketing site again.
“Site builders” like wix, Squarespace, etc. are basically all the same. They sandbox you into a selection of annoyingly rigid templates and a dumbed down UI and abstract the important stuff away.
Webflow is more of a “visual coding” platform. If you don’t know basic html/css you’ll have a hard time using it. It spits out static sites on the front end with proper readable html/css and SEO.
It’s a bit of a steep learning curve to get the hang of their UI but after a few hours, building things is insanely fast and you have control over everything.
I rebuilt my company’s entire site in it in about 4 hours and was blown away how easy it is to update things.
I’ve heard pretty much all YC companies are now using it to build their marketing sites because of this.
Comparing to other static site generators, you might as well ask how we ended up in a place where we "need" Jekyll, liquid templates, and ruby to build a static blog. Static site generators are great for maintaining static sites with many pages that share templates and commonly-reused components, and React specifically is basically an HTML templating language that just also has the ability to run the same code on the client and update the page while it's open, which is really useful if you have any dynamic bits on your page. It's true there's some stuff downloaded and processed on the client that's dead weight if you're not actually using any dynamic features, but it's asynchronously downloaded and the page successfully does its initial render before that and it's about the size of an image or a font, so I think worrying about it in most cases is a bit overblown.
I guess you got downvoted because the main point of the article is SEO, not react/react-helmet/graphql... Although I have to admit that I asked myself the same question.
I love how react-helmet is a super useful pervasive library with like 14k+ stars on GH developed by the NFL... it’s called helmet. It does the head stuff... I think it's brilliant. I know I'm like 6 years too late for the javascript hype but I'm just happy that's a thing.
