I wanted a stack where .md posts would look good by default, but I could make custom pages with javascript-based demos and interactivity trivially. I'm experimenting with and like the Astro ecosystem so far. So far the defaults seem intelligent and I couldn't believe how fast setting up pagefind was and how much better the results were than the other static site search engines I had tried.
(I'm coming from the Svelte and Sveltekit ecosystem, which I also like.)