This is the company behind Next.js, which I've had a wonderful experience using for React development. They've managed to do what I thought wasn't possible: abstracting away most of the build system. "Now" seems to do similarly well at abstracting away a lot of the hosting complexity.
They've made React development feel as simple as PHP. Or at least close. Just make a file and upload it.
I use Next by default for all React projects now. Just haven't found any reason not to, it's a joy to use. Same can be said for the Vue equivalent, Nuxt.
I’ve had a very similar experience building with nextjs. Drastically simplifies the boiler plate needed for a React app and gives you a concise api for SSR.
The positives are both are pretty similar but the usecase is different.
Gatsby probably isn't the right choice if you have a lot of pages (e.g. ecommerce site) as it has to render each page down to HTML during the build - so everytime you make a change, you have to rebuild all those files which could take a substantial amount of time. But if you were just building a few landing pages or a blog that required good SEO then Gatsby would be fine.
Next.js renders serverside on the fly and has good SEO.
Next.js is server-rendered which means it includes a light weight node.js server that pre-renders your pages, you can export everything as an static website, but it's not really the main selling point.
I like to use next.js for small brochure-like websites. I think it's simpler for simpler things. But for a more full-featured content site I would chose gatsby.
Would be interested in this as well. I currently use Gatsby for a personal site, and the development server is great and for prod I just sync production assets to an s3 bucket and serve from there. It's hard to see how it could get any easier.
They've made React development feel as simple as PHP. Or at least close. Just make a file and upload it.