As for WP, I like to use a static site generator like Hugo, unless you have huge requirements for dynamic server side resources (versus of a site with 1000s of pages, albeit static and highly cacheable).
My site is currently >100 pages, so it's modest in scale. Like many sites it consists mainly of static pages but there are dynamic features too, such as basic user comments and messaging. The generator program outputs the html, css and js needed. Written primarily in object-oriented Tcl, pages are generated from source files expressed in a generator-specific DSL. In practice it's way simpler and less exotic than this description suggests. To me "proof of the pudding" is that I can easily pick up where I left off even after being away from the project for a few months.
A goal for the generator is to finish packaging and documentation, then releasing as open-source. Not that there aren't already a million ways to create websites, but I figure one more can't hurt! ;-)