Tangentially related, but I re-iterated the style of my "simple text-based website" a few times. During this period I noticed that once I find a design that looks slick - it gets too familiar after a couple of weeks and then looses it's "charm" and all the other sites I read suddenly appear more readable. One such time I stumbled upon a very clean website [1] and thought to myself how good it looked. After inspecting the style it turned out that it only centered the text, reduced the size of the headers, and increased the line height; didn't even bother to declare font-family as serif or sans. And that's what I ended up using too. It gets boring, as all the other styles did, but having it at that level of minimalism has its own charms, so I am no longer adjusting anything.
Another, similar point, is that when the content is good - the style get's ignored. As an example, I read these [2] [3] from start to finish without distracting myself, and enjoyed the read. Didn't even notice that they are in a plain `txt` style, and when I did - it wasn't an issue.
Basically what I am saying is that people can pay too much attention on style, and it gets overrated. At least in my opinion.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210614170925/https://www.gtf.i...