This site used to be built by a static site generator with a theme, three plugins and a lockfile longer than all my posts combined. One day an update broke the date format and I decided I had had enough.
The replacement is about eighty lines: Markdown in, HTML out, one template, no JavaScript. The build is a Makefile target:
site: $(patsubst notes/%.md,out/posts/%.html,$(wildcard notes/*.md)) cp style.css out/ out/posts/%.html: notes/%.md template.html ./render $< > $@
Is it worse than the old setup? In many ways, yes. There are no tags, no RSS (yet) and no search. But I understand every line of it, and it will still work in five years. For a personal notebook that seems like the right trade.