15 years ago there were plenty of people paying $5 a month for shared hosting FTPing hand made HTML over. Now it is way easier and even tech people aren't hosting their own in general which is bad. Right now there are great JAM stacks out there. You could have your markdown formatted content in Git, rendered by Hugo, and then pushed to Cloudfront backed S3 for literally pennies a month and CDN'ed all around the world but hardly anyone does it. As tech people I think we are the most to blame posting to Medium because it is technologically easier than ever before to self host, yet most are too lazy.
FTPing HTML was infinitely easier than Git+Hugo+S3+Cloudfront.
And even if you can somehow cut through all the complexity of modern hosting — you still have to make those HTMLs. Only now they have to be responsive, look no worse than whatever is out there, look nice when posted on Facebook or Twitter, render well in various read later apps, and generally work with a wide ecosystem. And then you have to continue to make your site work with all the new stuff, preferably without breaking older pages.
You can indeed be simpler than most websites out there, and not lose anything important. But don’t kid yourself — the web is much more complex than it used to be.
You are correct it isn't trivial but I'd argue some stuff is even easier than in the past. Like the whole responsive design (or a design at all) is already accomplished by using any one of many themes offered for Hugo. Then you don't even have to know HTML, you can have a one page Markdown reference to do almost everything. I might want to work on something like this to make it more accessible to others, but my main argument is that for tech people this is trivial and here they are still using Medium.
https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ Is an example of how to do this. It has some steps but is not that hard. I think it can be even easier by scripting most of this out for less technical people.
