If you are willing to use netlify and are willing to use PHP, what is the inhibition to use a static site generator like Hugo? It is supported by netlify and others. I believe GitHub pages also supports a bunch of static site generators.
1. I need to have two different versions of my site, dev and prod, which I find very restricting and fragile.
2. I don't like to rely on other people updating their npm packages just so I could publish static content. I've been burned too many times by abandoned npm packages or breaking changes.