My main issue with writing html directly is that it's not a writing workflow. I write in my notepad, or in my notepad.exe or word about lots of things, only a few of which I would end up publishing, so htmlizing was always a publishing step that starts with a source material. From that it naturally follows that it can be easily automated, and html is a great format for this in theory, but even as a programmer WYSIWYG is so powerful, I'd rather write in Word or notepad exe and THEN annotate what are the headings and etceteras.
If you truly write directly in html, you are probably going to be writing about html or webdev, as your mind is in that headspace, and you have to tweak a lot of html stuff so that's what you get to talk about. Once you let go a bit of that primitive purism you realize you are free to think about whatever the fuck you want.
That said I have a lot of love for speaking about the medium. When I'm feeling cynical, it feels dumb to speak about anything other than the medium. It makes sense to me that half of the discourse on twitter is about elon musk, at least it's transparent in its topical bias, on typical media the topical bias gets rerouted and engineered through ads so that you can "focus on the actual content" which is kind of dumb, I guess, I find the ads end that keep the lights on end up being more important than yet another mindless sitcom.
So yeah, I'm torn. But whichever path is chosen, going through this drama of self hosting, tech minimalism and reinventing the wheel, is a key signature of the tech blog, it really shows the identity of the author and the work they've put into the mix of their ideas and their web space, in a way that, say, a wordpress instance, cannot fulfill.