I wrote my static site generator, too. It is a lot of fun, and much more powerful for my specific use case than any other around (and probably would fail miserably for any other use case). It took 2-3 days and I regret nothing.

There are some novel things though, like, I use markdown files, but separate sections with ``` so I can use different inputs like ```MD for markdown, or ```JSON for pure JSON data, or ```PHP for PHP code. The VS Code highlights the portion of the code correctly, so I can work on many formats/languages on the same page. The .md file looks like this:

   ```INI META
   includes = docs/index.html.md menu menuTop
   title = Theme
   base = docs/docs.html
   slug = theme
   ```

   ```JSON menu
   [
       { "label": "Demo", "url": "/demo/features" },
       { "label": "Try it!", "url": "/try.html?d=/data/try.json" },
       { "label": "Docs", "url": "/docs" }
   ]
   ```

   ```MD BODY
   # Customize the story
   
   Below are the parameters to customize the style of the story.
   ```   

Then I use a PHP script to serve the content live when in development (no compilation, very fast) and a deploy script to generate the HTML files and upload to AWS S3. Works perfectly.