Yeah, I got fed up with all the dependencies and processes and workflows and configurations and just manually made my site like it's 2004, just hand-written HTML+CSS+JS. As long as it's a small personal site, this is very robust and there is no constant churn and deprecations and change for the sake of change.
I have a couple of 100% handwritten sites as well. The challenge is when they go beyond about a dozen pages. If you want to change something across pages that isn't a find & replace, like adding a meta tag, it starts to be a drag. I'm going to be converting one of those sites to Swift Publish soon, as it's a low-dependency framework that hasn't been updated in years.
Sure, but many people just want to have a super basic academic site with like 1 or 2 pages ("simple minimalist academic-like website" as it was phrased upthread), and then start to fiddle with a million frameworks and the compilation chain is broken in a few months when you want to add your new publication to the site, and you have to dig through versions and dependencies and environments and CI/CD and whatnot. When you could just type up your site in one afternoon by hand and it will keep working indefinitely.
