Some guy shared his project in this post that does exactly that! Yes while that is possible and can get to a high level of automation via GitHub actions, the point of my URL shortener was more of people could post a link easily with a simple interface (like the interface for adding a new issue). But if I were operating with a fixed set of short links, then this would have been a good method!

I did exactly as you said, about a year or two ago, using Jekyll.

https://gitlab.com/davch/static-redirect

It will redirect to the url.

for browsers that load the page that contains that stanza and respect meta refresh, it will refresh and redirect you to the url=.

Not really. Copied it from somewhere else where the placeholder value was 7. 1 came to my mind before 0. Zero seems like it could be UB.