Author's case eliminates the "self-hosted nginx on a VPS" part. While there is no big difference (just a personal preference) if Hugo, Jekyll or other tool is being used to generate HTML from Markdown.
Ah, thanks, I missed that. I also somehow missed the “Just work” requirement which could rule out hugo. In my experience it requires quite a bit of tinkering to get going.
Now you have to keep patching a server for a static site