are those JS alternatives as easy as MM? I loved MM for how straightforward it felt, I didnt' have to load a ton of info in my head before being productive
Bridgetown looks very cool.
For a JS environment, Astro is likely the sweet spot for you. I liked the few days I did some R&D on it. My team uses vite with static site generation, templates in vue bc the rest of the apps we build are in vue. Astro doesn't give us anything more that we need besides a content framework, but so much of our content has to be ported from old html and sprinkled with some functionality from time to time… its easier to make everything components.
It's comfortable enough too, but it took a while to make it so.
A blog engine is basically just splatting strings together, and Ruby is the nicest language for splatting strings together by far.