Framework Wars Survivor Guide: Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Remix vs Gatsby

How We Hired a React Guy Who Couldn't Debug Gatsby

So our CTO goes "Gatsby is perfect, it's just React with GraphQL!" Hires this React dev for $95k who spent 6 months telling us to "add more RAM" every time builds hit Node.js memory limits. Turns out knowing React and knowing how to unfuck gatsby-node.js when it's choking on 10,000+ pages are completely different skills.

This dude's solution to everything was restart the server. Builds taking an hour? Restart Docker. GraphQL queries timing out? Restart the build. Memory heap exceeded? Restart everything and pray. Windows path length errors? "Works fine on my Mac." Content team screaming because they can't publish breaking news? "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

Dude spent 6 months suggesting we "just add more RAM" to our $4,000 MacBook Pros when the real problem was Gatsby trying to load 50GB of images into memory during builds. Even bought a 64GB desktop thinking it would help - Gatsby still crashed, just took longer.

Try running Gatsby development on Windows and you'll want to quit programming. WSL2 makes it slightly less awful but Windows developers were basically fucked. Our MacBooks from 2019 couldn't handle the memory usage - 16GB wasn't enough once you hit 5,000+ pages. M1 Macs couldn't even run half the Gatsby plugins we needed.

We burned through 3 different "senior React developers" before admitting that Gatsby requires a very specific type of masochist - someone who understands React, GraphQL, Node.js build processes, AND doesn't mind spending 40% of their time googling "gatsby sharp pipeline error win32" at 2am.

Interviewed 12 people after that. 11 ran when we mentioned Gatsby. The one who stayed lasted 3 weeks before updating his resume on Stack Overflow Jobs. Turns out "senior React dev who enjoys debugging non-deterministic build failures" isn't a real job category.

What we learned the hard way: When someone says "just React," run. It's never just React.

Testing Everything Else After Gatsby Hell

After the Gatsby nightmare, we spent 6 months testing frameworks. Not just picking the first alternative - actually building the same content site in Next.js, Nuxt 3, SvelteKit, and Remix to see what actually worked with our team.

SvelteKit was the biggest surprise. Builds were crazy fast - 5-8 minutes vs Gatsby's 45+ minute nightmares. Vite hot reload felt like magic after Gatsby's "maybe it'll work" approach. The bundle sizes were tiny, load times were insane, and everything just... worked. Problem? Try hiring Svelte developers who can actually ship production code. We interviewed 8 people, found 1 who'd touched Svelte, and he wanted senior React money for junior Svelte experience.

Nuxt 3 felt like Vue's answer to Next.js but better in some ways. Auto-imports meant less boilerplate, server API routes were cleaner than Next.js API routes, and the build process was more predictable. Issue? Our team knows React, not Vue. Training 6 developers on Vue syntax and ecosystem would've taken months we didn't have.

Remix was interesting in a "this might be the future" way. The nested routing approach made sense, server-first philosophy avoided hydration issues, and error boundaries actually contained problems instead of crashing the entire app. But our frontend team barely understood client-side React - asking them to think about server-side rendering, streaming, and progressive enhancement was like asking them to perform brain surgery.

Next.js won because it was boring. Switched to Next.js and suddenly we could hire normal React devs again. Not because Next.js is easier - it's because when shit breaks you get actual error messages. Like, with line numbers and stack traces. Revolutionary concept after 18 months of "Check your GraphQL queries" error messages that told you nothing.

Yeah, we're locked into Vercel now and the bills hit different. Still dealing with hydration errors but at least they happen predictably - client-side state doesn't match server render, fix the thing, move on with life. Not "delete everything and rebuild for 45 minutes hoping it works this time."

Edge functions are weird as hell and occasionally our API responses come back empty when deployed to fra1 but work fine from iad1. No idea why - Vercel's status page never shows issues but geographic routing is clearly fucked sometimes. Serverless cold starts still make our first-load times inconsistent but whatever - better than no deploys at all.

Vercel's pricing calculator is basically gambling. We budgeted like 400 bucks a month, hit over a grand last month because apparently our images triggered some CDN bandwidth spike. Don't ask me why - their analytics dashboard graphs make no fucking sense.

But our content team stopped wanting to murder us. New developers can actually contribute without spending 3 weeks learning Gatsby's plugin ecosystem bullshit. We spent more on Vercel bills in 6 months than the Gatsby guy's entire salary, but saved 20+ hours per week not debugging random build failures.

The Day Gatsby Broke Our Entire Workflow

Nobody tells you that Gatsby doesn't just slow down with more developers - it completely obliterates your workflow.

6 developers working fine, then suddenly builds jump from 12 minutes to 45 minutes overnight. Why? Someone added 500 blog posts to the CMS while we were sleeping. No warning, no gradual slowdown, just BAM - your deployment pipeline is fucked.

Tried everything: restart Docker, restart build server, restart our sanity. Checked if it was a plugin issue, a memory issue, a network issue. Spent 3 days profiling builds with Gatsby's debug tools (which are useless) before we realized it was just volume. More content = exponentially longer builds. Mathematical inevitability disguised as a sudden crisis.

Every push meant the entire team stopped working for 45 minutes. Couldn't test locally because 10k+ pages needed 8GB RAM minimum and our 2019 MacBooks started thermal throttling after 20 minutes. Fans spinning like jet engines, CPU at 95°C, battery draining in 2 hours.

Tried running Docker with 12GB allocated - thermal throttled even harder. Tried running on our beefier desktop machines - npm install kept failing with EPERM: operation not permitted errors that made no sense. Works on Sarah's machine, fails on mine with identical node versions. Still don't know why.

Gatsby Cloud looked like salvation until we got hit with a $2,400/month bill. For what? Incremental builds that randomly decided to rebuild everything from scratch anyway.

What We Should Have Built Instead

Just use Next.js - Same React components, 12-minute builds instead of 45. Yeah you're locked into Vercel but at least the content team can publish without praying to the build gods first.

Normal React SPA hitting an API - 90% of what we built didn't need static generation. Could've made a regular React app that fetches from our headless CMS API. Would've been done in half the time, with zero build step bullshit.

Literally anything else - WordPress, Ghost, hell even a static HTML site updated with rsync would've been less painful. At least when WordPress breaks, only the broken thing breaks.

Should've read Gatsby's own docs about performance issues and build optimization before committing to this nightmare. Pro tip: when the official docs have 47 different sections about fixing build performance, maybe the tool is the problem.

The Saturday Morning From Hell

Saturday, 7am. CEO calling because the website's completely fucked. Our 3am build failed and nobody noticed because apparently monitoring Gatsby builds on weekends is for people who enjoy pain.

The error message? Error: Cannot query field 'title' on type 'ContentfulBlogPost'. Same GraphQL query that worked for 6 months. Spent 2 hours trying random shit from our "Gatsby is broken" playbook:

• Cleared Gatsby cache (3 times)
• Deleted node_modules (12 times)
• Restarted Docker containers
• Checked Contentful API (working fine)
• Tried different Node versions (16.14, 16.15, 18.2)
• Cleared npm cache
• Even turned off Windows Defender thinking it was blocking file access
• Googled variations of the error for 30 minutes
• Checked if Mercury was in retrograde (it wasn't)

Nothing. Same fucking error every time.

Finally found the problem in a 2019 GitHub issue with 4 comments - someone put a regular apostrophe in a blog post title. Not Unicode, not some weird character, just a normal ' that Gatsby's GraphQL schema generator suddenly decided was poison.

Best part? The same apostrophe worked fine in development, worked fine in staging, but broke production builds for reasons that nobody on Stack Overflow could explain. CEO called every 20 minutes asking "is it fixed yet?" while I'm digging through Gatsby docs, Contentful forums, and r/reactjs trying to understand why an apostrophe can kill an entire website in 2023.

Had to manually hunt through 500+ blog posts in the CMS looking for apostrophes like some kind of medieval monk. Found three different articles with apostrophes - fixed all of them, triggered another build, waited 45 minutes. Still broke.

Turns out there was a fourth apostrophe in a meta description field that didn't even render on the page. Found it by exporting our entire CMS to JSON and running grep -n "'" content.json like a caveman. All because Gatsby can't handle basic punctuation without shitting itself.

Why We Switched to Next.js After This

You know what happens when weird content breaks Next.js? The page with the weird content returns a 500 error. The rest of the site keeps working.

You know what happens when weird content breaks Gatsby? The entire site goes down. 10,000 perfectly fine pages become inaccessible because one blog post had an apostrophe.

That's the difference: Gatsby is fragile as fuck. One bad piece of content, one GraphQL query that times out, one plugin that decides to break - your entire site dies.

Why Static Site Generators Are a Fucking Lie

After 18 months in Gatsby hell, I learned that static site generators work great until they don't - then you're completely screwed with no way to fix individual pieces.

When Gatsby works, it's beautiful. Perfect Lighthouse scores, instant loading, your CEO thinks you're a genius. But the build process is a house of cards held together with prayer and npm cache.

Random plugin breaks with ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/tmp/gatsby-transformer-sharp-1234567890.tmp'? Entire site down. CMS API timeout during build? Site down. Hit Node's memory limit at 4GB? Everything down. Deploy on a Thursday? Breaks for reasons that don't apply on Wednesday.

Favorite random failure: builds worked fine for 3 months, then started failing with spawn ENOMEM only on Ubuntu but not Mac. Same Docker image, same everything. Never figured out why. Just started building on Mac instead like savages.

Our Jenkins logs were a museum of inexplicable failures:

• Error: Memory heap limit exceeded during page creation (with 16GB available)
• Error: Sharp pipeline: Input buffer contains unsupported image format (JPEG was apparently "unsupported")
• GraphQL schema inference deprecation warning for type [object Object] (thanks, very helpful)
• Error: Cannot query field 'publishedDate' on type 'MarkdownRemark' (field existed, query was correct)
• Error: EISDIR: illegal operation on a directory, read (reading what directory? nobody knows)
• Error: spawn git ENOENT (git was installed, worked fine outside Gatsby)

Every error message felt like a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Half of them didn't even make sense grammatically.

Normal web apps? If one page has bad data, that page breaks. If your database is slow, some requests are slow. If an image is corrupted, that image doesn't load. The rest of your site keeps functioning like civilized software.

What Actually Works for Content Sites

After the Gatsby nightmare, we went with Next.js ISR and honestly it's fine. Not perfect, but fine. Builds take 10-15 minutes instead of 45+, content team can publish stuff without praying to the build gods, and when things break they break in predictable ways.

Could we have built the same thing with a regular React SPA hitting a headless CMS API? Yeah, probably would've been simpler. But the CEO wanted "blazing fast loading" and Next.js ISR gets you most of the benefits without the "rebuild everything when someone adds a comma" bullshit.

Don't Make Our Mistake

Look, I get why Gatsby seems appealing. The marketing is great, the demos look amazing, and static sites are "blazingly fast." But here's what nobody tells you:

Static generation doesn't scale. Period.

You can probably get to 1,000 pages fine. Maybe 5,000 if you're lucky. But the moment you hit real content volume - the moment your editorial team actually starts using the system - builds become this nightmare bottleneck that ruins everything.

We spent more time dealing with build failures than actually building features. And when something breaks, you can't just fix the broken thing. You have to rebuild the entire fucking site and hope it works this time.

What You Should Actually Use Instead

If your team knows React: Next.js is the boring, reliable choice. Yeah, you'll pay Vercel bills, but you'll also sleep at night. Your content team can publish articles without planning around 45-minute builds. Any React dev can jump in and contribute immediately.

If you're starting fresh: SvelteKit is probably the best technical choice. Fastest builds, smallest bundles, cleanest code. But good luck hiring developers. We prototyped our site in SvelteKit and it was beautiful - 5-minute builds, tiny JavaScript payloads, butter-smooth performance. Problem was finding people who could maintain it long-term.

If your team knows Vue: Nuxt 3 might be better than Next.js. Better auto-imports, cleaner server routes, more flexible deployment. Our Vue contractor built the same site in Nuxt and it was honestly cleaner than our React version. But we're a React team, so Vue didn't make sense.

If you understand servers: Remix has interesting ideas about progressive enhancement and error boundaries. Avoids a lot of Next.js hydration bullshit. But most frontend developers don't actually understand servers - they think "full-stack" means "I wrote an API route once."

If you want to keep it simple: Use a regular React SPA with a headless CMS API. It'll be faster to build, easier to debug, and way less likely to randomly break on a Saturday morning when you're trying to relax.

The Mysteries That Still Haunt Me

Even after escaping Gatsby hell, some shit still doesn't make sense:

Why did our builds work fine for 6 months, then suddenly start failing? Same codebase, same content structure, same everything. One day builds took 20 minutes, next day they crashed with memory errors. Never figured out the trigger. Still bothers me when I can't sleep.

What was that weird Sharp error on Ubuntu? For 3 months, builds randomly failed with "Input file contains unsupported image format" - but only on our Ubuntu CI servers, never locally. Same JPEG files that worked fine everywhere else. Would work for a week, fail for a day, then work again. Like the computer was playing pranks.

Why did GraphQL schema inference break randomly? Field exists, data is there, query works in GraphiQL. But production builds fail with "Cannot query field" errors until you restart everything multiple times. Makes no goddamn sense. It's 2025 and we're troubleshooting by restarting computers like it's 1995.

Also, fuck Docker while we're at it. Half our build issues came from Docker doing weird shit with file permissions and Windows path lengths. "Works on my machine" became our team motto.

Bottom line: Life's too short to debug Gatsby builds. Don't do what we did.

Check out Next.js deployment options, try SvelteKit if you're feeling adventurous, or just build a regular React app instead. You'll thank me later.