If I'm wanting to write about something I want to write about that thing, not write about that thing in the midst of a bunch of extraneous fluff like header tags, script tags, CSS, etc.

The author's thoughts about layers of indirection are confusing to me, I'd actually take the comparison the other way. If I'm not using markdown plus a static site generator now I have to keep track of things like layout, styling, script tags, etc myself plus the actual writing I was intending on doing.

I used to have an extremely simple markdown server. It presented 2 types of page, an index and an article. The index simply read the /content directory on the server. Requesting any file under /content would render the markdown into the article page and affix a date and time from the .md file's metadata.

Takes <1 hour setup and means you never have to copy and paste random files or do whole site page transformations (as the author has admitted to in that very post) to clean your mishmash HTML beast.