Why I still write plain HTML
Every couple of years I try a static site generator, and every couple of years I go back to writing HTML by hand. Not out of nostalgia — out of maintenance cost.
The problem with generators is not the build step itself. It is that the build step is a dependency, and dependencies rot. A site I generated in 2021 no longer builds because one plugin in the chain was abandoned and the runtime it needed moved on. The output was fine the whole time. It was the tooling around it that expired.
What plain HTML buys you
A hand-written page has no toolchain. It renders in ten years exactly as it renders today, because the browser is the only interpreter involved. Any editor can open it. Any static file server can serve it. There is nothing to install before you can fix a typo.
The cost is duplication: the header and footer are repeated on every page. I have decided that is a price worth paying. Duplicated markup is annoying; an unbuildable site is broken.
Where the line is
I am not arguing against build tools in general. If a site has hundreds of pages or a translation pipeline, generation is obviously correct. But for a personal site with a dozen pages, the generator is a liability that disguises itself as convenience.
So: one stylesheet, a handful of pages, and a rule that anything I add must still work if I have not touched the repository in three years.