In the '90s they weren't called static sites. They were just websites. Back in the day spaghetti code was a bit more common. But actually, it's just cruel and predatory behaviour.
TL;DR
Static sites rock. Faster, prettier, simpler, and easier than most blogging platforms. I just wish that every tutorial made by folks who code all day was proofread by folks who don't. (I feel the same way about nonlinear notetaking tools. Too many people can't use wildly better tools because the chasm between beginner and intermediate support is unreasonably wide.)
I discovered some nightmareish booby traps under the hood of a colleague's hosted wp-blog. The domain wasn't locked at the domain registrar level, but it was effectvely fake-locked at the hosting level. The deeper I looked, the more shenanigans I uncovered. In a time where lockdown has me on a strict road-rage-free diet, this provided quite a feast. All he wanted to do was upload his recent media interviews onto his site, but the tangled web of cpanel shenanigans got the site flagged as a phishing danger to any new visitors. Not great for business -- his or the spaghetti webhost of doom.
The new site was a breeze to setup. Simple {distill} site, made with 💙 by yours truly in RStudio, instantly deployed, full SSL, the works. Even just using the base {postcards} template, it's a much more professional look and feel than the old site. Clean, simple, done. A static site is so much easier than wrangling stats and data. So after quick little tutorial this colleague can effortlessly blog in RMarkdown -- faster to write, faster to load, and no more hosting nightmares.