I have two sets of anecdotal experiences I can tell you about: --- My personal blog -- a long time ago I've maintained a Wordpress blog, which have long been

I have two sets of anecdotal experiences I can tell you about: --- My personal blog -- a long time ago I've maintained a Wordpress blog, which have long been abandoned. The past 6-7 years I've maintained some articles on Medium (and more recently dev.to) instead, and about a year ago decided to fully move to my own, statically-generated site. I love the speed and security and git-based (backed up by nature) structure. I decided to opt for utteranc.es for comments (no one ever commented anyway, heh), but there are also other options for hosted comments. The thing that I did miss is a nice interface for writing. I thought I wouldn't mind writing raw markdown files in a code editor, but I actually did. More recently I am experimenting with Netlify CMS, which works ok, but I'll have to use it more before I decide if it's good or not. --- Another web site owned and maintained by a family member, which had been live for 20+ years -- I had to move it to a more modern system than just pure html files (thousands of articles pages!), and I chose something more like your latter option, but not exactly Grav. (I chose PicoCMS, which is also in PHP, and also file-based, with markdown files for content) It certainly allows the site to continue offering RSS feeds and other features with ease (a lot of plugins available with Pico). That site ended up going with hosted comments anyway so commenting wasn't a factor. There has pretty much been no drawbacks to this approach, other than using php and "old tech". I do like that all the content files are now in markdown though, which allows for moving to full SSG in the future easily. To be honest, if you aren't all about going with the trendy movement of SSG blogs, I think this option works totally fine. I can see this web site running with this same structure (and using PicoCMS) for years to come.