I haven’t used Gatsby per se but am interested. I do use other front-end tools like Vue tho, and enjoy them.

Found Mr. Matthews to be a bit arrogant/shamey, particularly about PHP. I don’t think there is an “old way” and a “new way”. There are different ways. When helicopters were invented they didn’t replace cars. You chose the right vehicle for the job.

Super front-end-focused people tend to have the “when all you’ve got is a hammer everything is a nail” syndrome. There’s a massive amount of complexity under the hood. They have abstracted away much of it for standard scenarios (like a blog site), but as soon as you start to solve real-world business problems you come into a world of hurt. How many times have you said to yourself something like, “if I were doing this in [PHP|Ruby|etc.] it would be [some small number] lines of code”. That’s when you really have to be honest with yourself…is the juice worth the squeeze.