The 1% of static site generators I've seen are written in scripting languages that require me to install an interpreter and related build tools. Then I'm stuck with their own custom template, markup, and configuration language. And I just don't really care to manage all of that. Even as a highly technical user.

I wrote one myself in the 90s in Perl (and have thankfully lost the source code). They're fun to noodle with if you have the time.

I currently run my site on Pelican (and even patched the WP importer so that it properly preserves WP formatting). It's great but terrible. I still have to keep around a virtualenv. I have to maintain templates that I'll never be able to reuse. It's still not quite good enough. It's a good thing I make my money programming in Python and am familiar with the developer tools.

I'd like something a little more hands-off and with fewer dependencies.

I found the OP's suggestion appealing because it sounds like a solution that wouldn't require me to install some interpreter, a bunch of supporting libraries and tools, write my templates in some custom template language, custom configuration language, scripts, yadda, yadda.

It would be nice to have a system that ran as a unix-y daemon or cron job that just took a single dot-file and did everything for you.