If all you need is a markdown-powered blog, then choose something that does only that. I use Gatsby because I'm familiar with React and it does what I need it to do.
I provide a few small businesses with simple websites to advertise their services (opening times and the like) where wordpress would have been the "traditional" choice, and the main thing I've learned from this is to stay away from loads of plugins or extra functionality until you absolutely need it - it's just more maintenance overhead and things to mess about with/configure. When I update a client site, I simply edit some text and regenerate the site - no plugins to update or config files to edit.