Why this blog runs on Astro and not React
When I set out to build this site I started with the wrong question: React or not React? A blog is text. The UI framework barely participates.
What does participate, every single day, is the generator: how a folder of Markdown turns into pages, what happens when a post has malformed frontmatter, and how much JavaScript someone downloads when all they wanted was to read.
Frontmatter as a contract
What settled it for me were Astro’s content collections. The frontmatter schema is declared with Zod:
schema: z.object({
title: z.string(),
date: z.coerce.date(),
lang: z.enum(['es', 'en']),
})Publish a post without a date and the build fails. It is not an undefined
that shows up rendered six months later on a page nobody was looking at.
React is still there
The difference is that it stopped being the default. A text page ships nothing; when a post genuinely needs an interactive demo, that is where an island goes — and only that page pays for it.