Agreed. I much prefer to pitch Hugo on the basis of its costs: It takes more knowledge to set up, but it also lets you host your site for free on a ton of places, like GitHub Pages, and that knowledge can be a very useful stepping stone for future devs will are interested in getting more into the web dev space.
That's why I wrote https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo way back when - to give myself just enough of a clue of what was going on that I could pick it up from there. Hugo makes an excellent stepping stone between "I know how to write HTML in Notepad" and "I can code up my own little web apps in Django", etc
For sure, Hugo looks pretty great! But I'm also a software engineer. I'm just saying it is disingenuous to suggest that it is easier than WordPress for nontechnical folk.
That's why I wrote https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo way back when - to give myself just enough of a clue of what was going on that I could pick it up from there. Hugo makes an excellent stepping stone between "I know how to write HTML in Notepad" and "I can code up my own little web apps in Django", etc