Yeah, everything you’re saying just invokes my fundamental distaste for the JS ecosystem. Hugo is fantastic for its utter lack of any sort of environment requirements. Requiring webpack, npm, React, and any dependencies else at all is a complete turnoff. Hugo’s Go-based templating isn’t difficult to pick up (I use it and extend it and I’ve never actually read any of the docs outside of one place I wanted to check on loop-based variables). Of course, I’ve been using various templating languages for over a decade, so I can pretty much see some examples and relatively immediately intuit how it works with little effort. For me, having to invoke npm is a non-starter for SSG work. I reach for an SSG because I don’t want any JS at all—or a very minor, controlled amount of it. To be fair, I feel the same toward just about any other SSG—if a person must setup an environment to use the tool, the SSG is doing it wrong.