I wouldn't say any of those qualify as "absolute minimum", particularly for personal sites which owe nothing to their visitors. Omitting img dimensions will cau

I wouldn't say any of those qualify as "absolute minimum", particularly for personal sites which owe nothing to their visitors. Omitting img dimensions will cause nothing worse than reflow, while a "what's new" section can be a partial alternative to RSS. As for Google, I'd presume a properly linked (internally) site should be fully crawled even without a sitemap. Maybe not as efficiently, but again, for a personal homepage it is sufficient. Of course in that case one can ask why not just use WP or a SSG that gives you those for free. The downside is of course the time you need to invest upfront in learning those tools and then keeping up to date with their changes and breakages. In contrast, simple HTML, CSS and JS can be safely expected to work for decades at the very least.