I've used a lot of static site generators including Hugo and Jekyll. Frankly, I find Go templating and other Jinja style templating an exhausting mental exercise. I don't like it for the same reason that I don't like using Go templating for server side rendering; I would prefer to have an entirely different code base that runs my frontend that only does frontend logic. Components just make that much sense and template partials will never compete with the flexibility of components. That was how I landed on Next.js and MDX for my blog. I get Markdown and I get components where Markdown just won't do and it's all statically compiled.

Jeff's approach of writing a separate comments application is interesting. I've seen people reuse GitHub issues to accomplish that, but that limits your audience participation to GitHub. The other obvious choice, I think, is a headless CMS. I'll be curious to see where he goes with it.