Agreed for the most part. Anything where SEO is critical (most things these days), we use Laravel for (trying to move away from Wordpress), with some custom classes to help standardize important SEO stuff.

I haven't had that experience with Hugo, but I pushed the files up to S3/Github Pages/Netlify and had them served from there. I'm a big fan of the concept.

I've had a great time with Gridsome, the VueJS version of Gatsby. I don't understand why, with React, you need to install a 3rd-party dependency just to update your meta tags. Like, it should either be part of your main layout when you set up your site (my Laravel approach), or there should be a built-in configuration for it, like Gridsome has (https://gridsome.org/docs/head/). Every site needs this stuff, so it should be a first-class feature.