Serious question: Why generate a static site at all instead of running next.js behind a CDN? Now a publish is really just a publish instead of a rebuild.
It's a fair question that everyone should ask themselves in our shoes. If we did it again maybe we'd rethink.
That said, the entire goal was to allow a non-engineer to more easily enable our end-users with documentation. We didn't anticipate the amount of engineering hours it'd take to actually get this functioning well given its adoption and ecosystem. Even the investment into MDX though was to service the core goal: create clean abstractions for the complexity where possible.
If the goal was easier content authoring you can tie Gatsby (or next) to a CMS. Something like Prismic is pretty inexpensive. You can easily tie publishes to trigger a site rebuild.
