> What is the alternative to tools like Gulp or Gatsby for those of us who want to make (fairly)simple websites?
Gulp has nothing directly to do with building a website, it is a compilation tool of sorts that allows you to transform your source files into something you'll end up deploying via various plugins. For example, you can use gulp to collapse all your JS source files into one or to transpile it into something more cross browser compatible.
The reason I dislike Gulp is that it has a massive number of dependencies and really is just an overcomplicated reimplementation of pipes. Personally, I prefer Webpack. It is also a fairly large tool, but at the very least it actually does something useful out of the box. When I migrated our projects from Gulp to Webpack, I replaced a over 500 lines of gulp code with about 50 lines of config and a small bash script.
Gulp has nothing directly to do with building a website, it is a compilation tool of sorts that allows you to transform your source files into something you'll end up deploying via various plugins. For example, you can use gulp to collapse all your JS source files into one or to transpile it into something more cross browser compatible.
The reason I dislike Gulp is that it has a massive number of dependencies and really is just an overcomplicated reimplementation of pipes. Personally, I prefer Webpack. It is also a fairly large tool, but at the very least it actually does something useful out of the box. When I migrated our projects from Gulp to Webpack, I replaced a over 500 lines of gulp code with about 50 lines of config and a small bash script.