Exactly. I ran into this when trying to set up Hugo, and wrote for myself a notes page with the following:

# What is Hugo?

`hugo` is a program that takes some .md files (ideally, conforming to a certain directory structure) and creates some .html and .xml files (conforming to another directory structure).

This is the minimal command:

    # Create input directory structure to silence warnings
    mkdir content layouts{,/tags,/categories}
    touch layouts/home.html layouts/{categories,tags}/list.html
    # Run hugo: creates public/ and resources/
    hugo

…and building from there.

If you read the Hugo documentation, it talks about all kinds of stuff but doesn't explain anything from the bottom up: apparently the usual way is to start with a pre-existing theme or site as template and edit it, but that's not explained anywhere either. After you eventually learn exactly what Hugo is, it becomes ok to use.