Totally get that. My post was meant as a way, not the way. I already use Obsidian for most of my writing and notes, so this setup just fits naturally into my workflow.
Keeping Hugo installed and up to date as part of the publish process seems like a headache as well. I like the blog to be totally separate from my local machine, so if I change anything or switch laptops, it doesn't interfere with the publication process.
Manually adding the Hugo front matter to each post also strikes me as annoyingly fiddly, although you could use a text expander app to handle most of it. Another issue is that I'm not sure that Markdown would do well for the full scope of formatting, such as aligning images and adding image captions.