The solution the author comes to is great, AND, I think it says that as a blogger you should probably always own or create your own tools.
I went down this same path, and Svekyll is my result (combination of Jekyll conventions with Svelte).
(https://svekyll.com or https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/)
Svekyll offers a different perspective to get the same benefits as documented in this great post. I love that we generally reached the same conclusions as to what is important.
* WYSIWYG editor: Svekyll just builds from Markdown files (https://svekyll.com/Markdown)
* Customizable themes: Svekyll lets you configure DaisyUI themes in your _config.yml (e.g.: theme: dracula, https://svekyll.com/Theme)
* SEO out of the box: Svekyll has this too (https://svekyll.com/SEO).
* Runs forever: Svekyll compiles each post to a single independent HTML page (zero JS or CSS links, it is all inlined, https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli#technical-notes-on-svekyll-cli)
* RSS Feed Support: add rss: true to the _config.yml and get RSS. And, you can even add RSS feeds for each tag. (https://extrastatic.dev/svekyll/svekyll-cli/-/merge_requests/11, and see an example here: https://webiphany.com/2023-10-16-building-webapps-for-the-amazon-kindle-paperwhite-browser)
* Improved post creation: while not a feature of Svekyll itself, ExtraStatic (my hosting service) let's you create posts as Markdown by sending an email. This is an example where building on a simple foundation like Markdown opens a ton of possibilities.
* Analytics: Add matomo analytics to Svekyll in your _config.yml (https://svekyll.com/Analytics).
* Featured posts: stumped by this, but definitely a problem!