It may be overkill at first, but run a site for long enough, and the static generator starts to make a lot of sense.
I originally had static HTML, but that was well over 10 years ago at this point. Soon you want to wrap your pages with a template to get rid of boilerplate and keep your site consistent. Then you want auto-generated indexes, and maybe you want to check for broken links, add width/height to <img> tags, etc.
My personal website has hundreds of pages on it, not counting the auto-generated index pages. Automation is a necessity at this point. It is still written in HTML... I never adopted anything like Markdown, and I've abandoned any use of custom syntax like Hugo's or various templating systems, at least, outside the static site generator code itself.
I originally had static HTML, but that was well over 10 years ago at this point. Soon you want to wrap your pages with a template to get rid of boilerplate and keep your site consistent. Then you want auto-generated indexes, and maybe you want to check for broken links, add width/height to <img> tags, etc.
My personal website has hundreds of pages on it, not counting the auto-generated index pages. Automation is a necessity at this point. It is still written in HTML... I never adopted anything like Markdown, and I've abandoned any use of custom syntax like Hugo's or various templating systems, at least, outside the static site generator code itself.