I did the same thing, but implemented my site generator in Go. My site has grown by a lot over the years, but I can still build it from scratch (from MD files, HTML snippets and static files) in less than one second!

Also have a RSS feed generator and it can highlight code in most programming languages, which is important to me as I write posts on many languages.

I did try Hugo before I went on to implement my own, and I got a few things from Hugo into mine, but Hugo just looked like far too overengineered for what I wanted (essentially, easy templating with markdown as the main language but able to include content from other files either in raw HTML or also markdown, with each file being able to define variables that can be used in the templating language which has support for the usual "expression language" constructs). I used the Go built-in parser for the expression language so it was super easy to implement it!

Used this for code syntax higlighting: https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma And this for markdown: https://github.com/russross/blackfriday

The rest I implemented myself in simple to read Go code.