I'm happy to hand author a small site, but the line for me has been around 3 or 4 pages before I reach for one templating engine or another. For something like

I'm happy to hand author a small site, but the line for me has been around 3 or 4 pages before I reach for one templating engine or another. For something like a marketing site, the homepage is usually custom enough that you wouldn't repeat yourself much. Throw in an about us or contact page and you'll be fine. Much past that and I want partials for basics like the header and footer, and likely a few layout components. Debugging a static site generator should be a thing in my opinion. When you gave to debug an SSG it's because the tool has to much magic built into it like automatic data pipelines, opinionated front-matter schemas, etc.