I so wish I was code savvy enough to build a simple blog site on Hugo or one of the other SSGs. (sigh)
I would recommend poking around with 11ty,[0] which I find to be significantly simpler than Hugo.
The Go templating of Hugo is extremely confusing for most non-Go people. After using it for years I still constantly look up how to do simple conditionals.
11ty is a very competent, "good enough" generator. We used it to build this site[1] for CERN back in 2019 from scratch over the course of a few days.
Yes, Go templating is quite hard. There was a feature request[1] to implement the Django/Jinja2-like Pongo2 template engine[2], but got rejected because it would have been a too big change.