Recently took on the challenge on learning Hugo, its quick but his learning curve is high (compared against Jekyll and Gatsby), specially because the docs seems to be more curated towards content management and how to deal with markdown limitations rather than web/front-end design, therefore there is no tutorial hell for "how to design your own theme", you have to look at how others solve it to give you and idea and once you get a glimpse on how they do it, you can go fast without using shortcodes, partials and other "weird things hugo have".

Only thing i will change in Hugo is how unopiniated tries to be, it always has at least 3 to 4 ways to the same thing and configurate the same thing with json, toml, yaml, etc...