If you care about your readers, your site should probably have navigation links, maybe even search and an RSS feed. So now you are talking about editing lots of things by hand or moving to some kind of automation. If you like coding HTML by hand, that's great, do it, but there's also nothing wrong with having some infrastructure to build navigation, indices, etc. HTML is analogous to other markup languages, such as latex or markdown, and has its strengths and weaknesses. There is nothing inherently virtuous about it.<p>Not trying to be harsh but I feel like the "purist" opinion presented in the article is an affect which can only be expressed about sites unburdened by the presence of or desire for readers.
Interesting! I followed pretty much the exact same trajectory on my sites. I started a couple of decades ago with handcrafted HTML, then wrote a couple of my own CMSes, then moved to WordPress, and now I'm back to handcrafted HTML.<p>Every approach has advantages and disadvantages, but for me, for most of my sites, coming back to plain HTML has truly been a joy.
If it is a blog though, please make sure to create XML feed (RSS or Atom), I don't consider sites that don't have it as blogs. Again even a simple templating language can do this, you could even run pug in cli mode and produce valid RSS feed.
Also by the author, about the bloatedness of news sites today, <a href="https://zainamro.com/notes/unbearable-news" rel="nofollow">https://zainamro.com/notes/unbearable-news</a>
I like to divide tools into things that solve difficult computer science problems and ones that are just plain cool, like Jekyll. The latter category is like a drug since you can get lost having fun doing so much stuff without needing to think too deeply with all the rough mental workouts. But that usually isn't rewarding in hindsight. It's better to be attracted to the austere. There's less distraction that way. Although, swearing off the shiny things doesn't necessarily preclude having a more fabulous web design, OP ;)