Gatsby announced the discontinuation of support for Node 6 in its v2.10.0 release due to Node 6 reaching its end-of-life status and the growing difficulty in maintaining compatibility with the outdated version. This decision aims to enhance the efficiency of delivering new features and fixes by aligning with the majority of Gatsby's dependencies that no longer support Node 6. The change is categorized as a potential breaking change because it impacts less than 1% of Gatsby users, allowing the team to implement it in a minor release. The technical shift involves updating the Babel preset to transpile code for Node 8, enabling the use of modern JavaScript features and reducing the need for additional workarounds. The transition to supporting Node 8 and above is designed to streamline development processes, despite the potential for minor disruption among the few users still reliant on Node 6. An upgrade guide is available for those affected, and warnings are issued to users attempting to run newer Gatsby packages on obsolete Node versions.