I created my own static site generator about 10 years ago. It was only around 100 lines of code:

https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/tiny-ssg

I used it for a few websites, viable replacement for Assemble and other SSGs of that time.

I'm a non engineer, never-coder but fairly technical guy and about a year ago I had Lovable.dev write me a static site generator because I understood the value of it to host cheaply/freely and thought it'd be a good exercise. It takes .md files with a basic YAML frontmatter and publishes just the blog part (each .md file is blog post) of the site, but it was a good learning process and I think most people don't understand how simple the web can be when the goal is to publish content efficiently.

> Bloated file sizes due to javascript libraries for lazy loading data.

Use of JS, including the NPM-backed bloat you see in libraries used on the modern web, is orthogonal to whether a site is on a static host or not—which is what "static website" actually refers to.

For examples, see: a bunch (most?) of the stuff hosted on GitHub Pages.

> Nowadays every page you see is always using fancy technologies and "modern" UI that looks like unicorn barf.

... says the person responsible for authoring/publishing a post exhibiting some of the worst decisions I've seen for styling a Web page all week.