gastby is nice if youre already familiar with doing frontend using React. mkdocs is nice if you want something dumb as nails: just give it the markdown files, and itll build the static assets. i think it has hot reload somewhere too. https://www.mkdocs.org/
I'll look into both, but "parse markdown, generate static" sounds promising -- thank you (Basically looking for a blog + a few static pages like about, blogroll, etc)
You might like something I built if you want something really, really simple:
https://src.xza.fr/python/blog_generator_py/
But note I didn't doc it as I just made it for personal use. But the way you run it is ./py/generate_blog.py, and you need to have Perl implementation of "markdown" installed (usually apt-get install markdown)