I've been experimenting with minimal blogs for about 15 years. Some tricks I learned:

* You can get away with const title = lines.match(/# (.+)/)[1] and avoid frontmatter.

* My blogs never have so many posts they need pagination or tags, or categories, or sorting.

* JSX turns out to be a great vanilla server side string builder if you use a questionable hack like https://immaculata.dev/guides/enabling-jsx.html

* GH Pages with arbitrary build steps instead of (sigh) Jekyll is really easy now with things like https://immaculata.dev/guides/using-gh-pages.html

* highlight.js is still basically the king of super easy code syntax highlight by adding literally three lines to your HTML (shiki is cool but slooooow)