Jekyll's workflow is horrible compared to Hugo. A single binary that explains mostly whats going wrong vs a crazy mix of ruby gems that need to be installed with a meta-package that is hard to find in the Github support docs.
I currently use it in place of Jekyll on github. I fought jekyll enough trying to get it to do what I wanted. Now I don't need to worry about it.
Another awesome feature: Since this is mostly used for personal sites and a lot of those are portfolio + blogs you have multiple "content type"s made by different folders. So you can show all your posts easily by iterating over the posts and then show all your projects by doing the same. They each can have separate default templates.
Odd. I found the exact same opposite. Granted, I have been using Jekyll for some time now and only tried Hugo for one afternoon. But I found Hugo very opinionated in how the site should be structured and it felt more like working with a CMS than with a static site.
We do this for hugo (and any other build tool) at Netlify (https://www.netlify.com) together with a whole bunch of extra features to make the workflow even easier.
On GitHub Pages, GitHub will run a basic Jekyll for you -> you don't have to install or run it locally, just edit the source files in the repo and it builds and publishes the page for you.
