Sorry, probably missing something obvious: what prevents you from using Emacs instead of pandoc to convert Org to HTML in whatever pipeline you have going already?
i.e. If your answer to anyone's problem using Org is "what prevents you from using Emacs", then that ain't standardisation.
My comment was written with the intention of seeing if I could help with the specific problem the GP mentioned, since it seemed like the GP had overlooked a possible solution. I should have been more clear about that, sorry.
When I created the current iteration of my website[1], I started out just adding some custom export formatting advice to the default ox functions. I couldn't resist add some additional functionality, though, and it takes refreshingly little work: There's one function that iterates through the Org source files and uses the built-in Org functions to query the files for tags, title, date, and so on. The result is memoised in a list, and then various other functions iterate through that list to generate index page, tag listing, and so on.
I started working on ox-hugo exactly to have an Org export solution that exports the content + meta-data. If you look at the screenshots on the ox-hugo homepage (linked in BeetleB's comment), you'll see what I mean.
Ask me anything about it.