Today I learned about Hugo Themes.
Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. Or in their words
The world’s fastest framework for building websites
Essentially the idea, like with many static site generators, is that you can write your content in something simple and pleasant like markdown and then have a program combine it into a fully functional website (html, css, js).
I had looked into Hugo previously so there wasn't a ton new there. Actually the real lesson learned was that you can sink an endless amount of time into finding the almost-perfect-but-not-quite-right theme.
In the end I was stuck between journal and Lithium, both minimal blog like themes that show a clean list of posts. After much deliberation and tinkering, and tweaking, I realized was deep down a rabbit hole with no carrot in site. I went with Lithium and looks good for now.