I don't really get the saving or convenience of Markdown, esp., if you are already used to typing HTM. (HTML for simple things is easy and short enough, and fancy things are beyond Markdown anyways.)

Here's my stack:

Hosted webspace (yes, like it's the 1990s!) Apache/Unix, simple PHP templates for headers and footers, basic navigation, etc w/o JS, for the blog a custom (server-side) script generating virtual article locations, navigation, meta data, basic chrome, and a RRS feed from a simple data-file and reading static HTML for the content from static files. BBEdit for editing. No analytics. (The webspace comes with Webalizer, but this stopped working some 10 years ago. I don't care.)

And yes, there are special pages with full-fledged JS apps, as well, or blog posts featuring complex things, so nothing is chiseled in stone. If there's a purpose to it. However, a visitor should be able to get an idea what a page is about without JS.