Can confirm. I'm doing https://wordsandbuttons.online in plain HTML and yes, it's incredibly liberating.

But I went a bit further, I do write HTML by hand in vim (plus some python scripts when applicable). Writing HTML is not that bad once you get used to it. My pages are not plain text anyway. They are mostly interactive things written in JavaScript. Since I spend considerable time coding, it doesn't bother me to spend five minutes putting tags here and there, too.

Coming up with the design decisions takes much more effort than typing in the actual tags.

And yes, I do have an RSS. It's also updated manually since it's again an effort too small to automate.