> after a lot of experimenting I settled on 11ty at the time, but I really don't enjoy writing Liquid templates, and writing reusable components using Liquid felt very clumsy. I just wish it was much easier to use the JSX based templates with 11ty, but every step of the way feels like I'm working against the "proper" way to do things.

Doesn't Eleventy support most of the common old-school templating languages? I once converted a site using Mustache from Punch [1] to Eleventy.

Eleventy is great, and in some ways I prefer it to Hugo if build time isn't an issue. At least templates don't break, like most of the comments here say.

I eventually redid the site from scratch (with a bit of vibecoding magic back when v0 got me into it) with Astro.

[1] https://github.com/laktek/punch