I think that the best setup is Jekyll on GitHub pages. It's the lowest-effort way to turn text files into a website.

If you don't start from scratch, the biggest problem with static websites is maintaining old URLs. At some point you need URL rewrite rules, and then you can't just have static files on a server. You need server rules.

It's also nice to just editing text files locally without having to install stuff. Then you need some sort of build system on another server.

Then you might find that you need forms, comments and other features beyond text on a page.

Basically, it's hard to have just static files.