Used Netlify back in the day (prior to Cloudflare pages / workers sites). The experience was largely smooth. HOWEVER, pricing was both opaque and prone to explode without warning, with little to no way of setting billing limits. Ultimately, that was too risky for the kind of small-ish projects I'm running. They had the Netlify CMS for a while, which I quite liked. But that's gone now. Be interesting to know what their USP is over CF Pages.
Just in case you haven't seen it, there's a new free plan with no overages for small projects that you don't want to worry about overages for: https://www.netlify.com/blog/introducing-netlify-free-plan/
Netlify is Vercel before Vercel.
Netlify being related to Gatsby and Vercel being related to Next.js.
Not exactly. More that Netlify started as a no-devops-needed static website hosting platform, and gradually branched off into value props that naturally fit into that starting point.
Vercel (formerly ZEIT) basically did the same thing.
Since founding, both companies have raised an insane amount of VC money, making them both unicorns by valuation a few times over. Though imo it remains to be seen if this was actually a good investment. Neither company seems to have fully made good on their business model, which is quite similar in both cases: encourage and allow devs (or non devs) to do the absolute bare minimum of work in exchange for hosting/bandwidth/etc prices that many consider exorbitant.