🔧 Generating PDFs from HTML in Node.js (and why I stopped using Puppeteer)

Last year I was adding invoice generation to a side project. Three days later I was still debugging Puppeteer on a DigitalOcean droplet.

Blank PDFs, fonts not loading, the process eating 400+MB of RAM for a single render.

I shipped something that worked 90% of the time and crossed my fingers.

If that sounds familiar, here's what I've learned...