I felt similar, but after making a Gatsby site recently, I see two real advantages.
The separation between the data and the HTML structure/design with Markdown.
Well maintained plugins, which save hours adding certain features.
Regarding Markdown: I think having content in Markdown has a lot to be said for it, especially as I can easily syndicate the same content to dev.to, hashnode, medium, etc. To add content, I just open a text file and blog without having to delicately copy and paste new files and content into DOM structure. Views like the collection page also auto-update, adding one blog posts to my site updates 3-4 visual views, (homepage, collection, tags, etc.) this would take much longer by hand and is more error-prone.
Regarding plugins: When adding an SEO plugin, for example. I modified one template, I populated the meta description from the same markdown description data, and it was much faster than editing all previous posts to add that same functionality. Also, future data edits roll out to all the various places, again less error-prone.
Plain HTML and CSS, anything more is excessive
I felt similar, but after making a Gatsby site recently, I see two real advantages.
Regarding Markdown: I think having content in Markdown has a lot to be said for it, especially as I can easily syndicate the same content to dev.to, hashnode, medium, etc. To add content, I just open a text file and blog without having to delicately copy and paste new files and content into DOM structure. Views like the collection page also auto-update, adding one blog posts to my site updates 3-4 visual views, (homepage, collection, tags, etc.) this would take much longer by hand and is more error-prone.
Regarding plugins: When adding an SEO plugin, for example. I modified one template, I populated the meta description from the same markdown description data, and it was much faster than editing all previous posts to add that same functionality. Also, future data edits roll out to all the various places, again less error-prone.
Those points are fair but this seems like overkill for a personal portfolio. Especially the SEO