I would really think it depends on use-case. If you are tired of Wordpress bloat and want something simpler you can probably build a markdown server over a directory with a very very minimal template. I remember Renato used to do that for docs, just serve a website on top of a dir containing markdown files.

But as you invest time and effort, get more readers and asks from your readers, your need for features even for a simple blog will increase. At least basic conversation around content. You will probably end up using Discuss or decide to make your simple blog much more complex by introducing a database (or may even be just flat files on S3).

At some point you will either focus on only "writing" and sharing ideas in which case a simple publishing infra is good. If you want more, you will probably end up building a Jekyll, Hugo etc. from scratch or better adopt and contribute to one of these :)