Eh, I don't think a person can ever write enough articles and rewrite their layout enough times that search+replace overhead ends up bigger than the upfront tim

Eh, I don't think a person can ever write enough articles and rewrite their layout enough times that search+replace overhead ends up bigger than the upfront time it takes to read jekyll/hugo/whatever docs (plus debugging idiosyncrasies, etc). And even if search and replace was slower overall, you might be looking at a difference of minutes over a period of decades (i.e. it wouldn't actually matter in any practical sense). Far too often I see people spend days to save 2 seconds (and then proceed to not realize the savings over a long enough timespan)