> Once you figure out how to really effectivity use it you can be productive and build out some huge websites and it's fast as hell.
I don't doubt that, but a site that is a) huge, and b) doesn't require interactivity seems rather niche to me. SSG's really shine to me on small sites, and to some degree mid-sized ones. Code documentation is a good example, where I made some new library at work and now I want to dump some nice documentation somewhere. It's only a few pages, all I need is a way to convert Markdown to HTML in a semi-pleasing format, and have the SSG handle creating an index or ToC sidebar so people can navigate.
Hugo sucks for this. The templating language is Go's, which I don't care for much, and doesn't seem to be very widely used outside of Hugo. So now I have to learn a DSL just to use Hugo, which is unlikely to be useful for anything else, ever.
The templating language also seems to change constantly. I feel like every time I update Hugo, I have to go find a new theme, because now I get 10,000 warnings that they're going to redo the whole template API, and like 7 things my theme is doing aren't compatible with their new API. Of course, someone will say that I can build my own theme. And you're right! If I want to go become an expert in this esoteric DSL so I can figure out how to iterate over pages to build my ToC. Plus now that I'm building a theme, part of me starts wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just hand-write the HTML.
These NodeJS site generators are at least an order of magnitude easier to work with. I get code completion, so I don't have to try to remember all the various built-in and custom macros. I get unit tests, so when I change something in my theme, I can test it. I find that it's easier to genericize things from tutorials as well. If I want to add a navigation sidebar to all my pages, I just need a tutorial that shows me where I hook into the base page template (i.e. add a customizePageTemplate() call when you instantiate the renderer or something). From there I can use code completion and docs to figure out what I have access to to do the things I want. Again, that's because it's a familiar domain. If I want to do the same thing in Hugo, I pretty much need a tutorial specifically dedicated to customizing the base page templates. Even if someone tells me where to customize it, I end up having issues because the things you can access inside Hugo depend on where you are in the rendering pipeline, and Hugo's templating language doesn't make it easy to tell what you have access to at the moment.
I do admire their speed, but I have had effectively no situations where I have a site that is both large enough to be worth learning the DSL, and simultaneously doesn't require anything that Hugo makes difficult.