Good for you, my experience with Jekyll is closer to OP's experience with Node. I have a big website that I built in 2014, with tons of custom plugins, that is now stuck on Jekyll 2.x and Ruby 2.x, and has a ton of hidden C++ dependencies. The way I build it now is using a Dockerfile with Ubuntu 18.04. I probably could update it given enough effort, but I was rather thinking of rewriting it in Astro.js or Next.js.