Agreed. I much prefer to pitch Hugo on the basis of its costs: It takes more knowledge to set up, but it also lets you host your site for free on a ton of places, like GitHub Pages, and that knowledge can be a very useful stepping stone for future devs will are interested in getting more into the web dev space.

That's why I wrote https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo way back when - to give myself just enough of a clue of what was going on that I could pick it up from there. Hugo makes an excellent stepping stone between "I know how to write HTML in Notepad" and "I can code up my own little web apps in Django", etc

For sure, Hugo looks pretty great! But I'm also a software engineer. I'm just saying it is disingenuous to suggest that it is easier than WordPress for nontechnical folk.

Agreed.

I would also add that the static site generators have little if any decent templates to work with. Most of them are so basic that to get them to any level that looks good, it will take a lot of work. For instance, if you use Gatsby, then you're going to need to know ReactJS to be able to do change anything or improve on it. This is true with virtually any static site generator.

Contrast that with Wordpress which has literally thousands of really well made, well designed templates that take minutes to install in your CMS. Because there is a such huge variety to choose from, finding one that fits you the best is relatively easy which also means the changes you would have to make would be minimal.

Hugo does not even come with a rudimentary theme out of the box. Which adds needlessly complexity for someone to just bang out a blog post.

To be fair, the wordpress install instructions presumably say "1. Install PHP and MySQL on your Linux web server"

Most basic hosting services to this day still have a one click Wordpress, Drupal and various other CMS installs. GoDaddy advertises they have a one-click Wordpress install.

You are correct that if you plan on using your local machine for development then yes, you would have to know PHP and MySQL. Then you would need to know a bunch of other stuff in order to do that which opens another can of worms.

In my experience, this is what also makes Wordpress attractive - the low overhead to get up and running. Most people/businesses I know who used WP, just got a hosting account, transferred their domain and did all their development right on the production version of their site.