Hugo is absolutely fantastic and incredibly powerful. It's nowhere near as simple as was requested. It's the most setup of any of the SSGs worth using.
Much easier to write templates in a real language.
Most of the time I need to map data to something else suitable for rendering. That mapping goes from markdown frontmatter to some nice form.
I ended up not using templates at all due to how cumbersome it is to write any kind of data transformations inside the template language.
Might as well just generate html myself.
A nice example is generating menu contents from a list of menu items with their sort weight and links. Ends up being very cumbersome.
Once I got that, and learned some Go templating in the process, it's just markdown files, fire and forget.