I don’t get it. Their setup is so much more complicated and limiting than what they had on Wordpress.

I won’t argue with their reasons to move (which don’t stack up for me either but agree to disagree).

what's the advantage of a static site generator over pandoc + makefile?

I recently retired my Wordpress blog and replaced it with a static-site generator. My requirements were straight-forward and I ended up having Codex build it for me.

It was the last thing using MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress on my site. 3 big things to not have to keep up-to-date and secured. I can check in markdown to my repo, it builds the site, and Nginx serves it. So fast, and secure.

interesting, we went from classic CMS to Jekyll, then Hugo, then Astro and finally built our own CMS - for larger sets of content and sites. Fiddling with custom DSLs, templates, weird builds and tricks ... was just way too time consuming - unthinkable my wife would ever touch it or write an article in there :)

Have a look at https://service.polymech.info/user/cgo/pages/poolypress-cms, agentic CMS, translates, creates and manages articles with a few prompts, widget aware.

Been on the Jekyll bandwagon for a long time now; it's my go-to static site generator.