What I like about this: everything else I do is in org-mode anyway, so this fits my brain. I also have some nice org-mode tooling to make things like footnotes, margin notes, etc. look really nice.
A little convoluted, sure, but I've seen worse. :-P
Don't get me wrong, it is a really nice project which I do recommend to people who don't want to go down the path of writing their own custom site maker... The single-binary formula allows hugo to offer a much better set of trade-offs than the competition.
But... if you can write your own, write your own. It is a glorious yak shave.
My only tip will be to avoid all dependencies like the plague. For stability and sanity.
The upshot... After over two years of using my dinky-ass handmade pandoc-usin' (not even parallelised) static site maker, I feel hugo is not even as fast as what I have.
I get the computer to hit F5 on the browser (and/or type URLs into the url box and hit enter).
Here is how it works (and it works great!): https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite?tab=readme-ov-file#ho...
Yeah, that's bitten me and it's super stupid. At this point, I've just pinned hugo so I don't update it any more. It's a friggin' static site with basically no Javascript (just a little for the site search feature—handled by the theme) so I don't feel any need to keep Hugo up-to-date.
Here's the source for that entire post: https://gist.github.com/ashton314/e63c9ed31c38c421f11d84df1f...
The shortcodes are a little messy, I will admit, but I have a temp.el snippet that expands to the right thing so authoring isn't too bad.
org-babel: I'm not sure. Here's the docs for code block handling in ox-hugo: https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/doc/source-blocks/