Hugo user here. I just wanted to reinforce your message - I sometimes think about posting on Medium instead, for "hits"... When I crave attention; but as you said, those readers likely aren't my target audience anyhow. For those thinking of using Hugo (or any static site generator), do it!
Hugo is great until you want to do something it doesn't support. The performance and single-binary nature of Hugo are really cool, but I ended up sticking with Jekyll for its robust plugins API despite the trade-offs in speed and complexity (dealing with gem/bundler, maybe even rbenv, etc)
Similarly, it took me about 2 hours to set up a personal Jekyll website with a deployment script to a S3 static website cached by cloud front. I usually pay less than $1 per month in AWS fees.
No trackers, no JavaScript, no third party assets. If you can get away with a static website it is definitely the way to go and the tools are out there and easy to use.
Not if you use GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify, Neocities etc etc. They all offer the same kind of deal substack and wordpress do, ie an author.platformname.com kind of domain.
