I still do feel there's something not quite right. Hopefully I'll be able to get it out in the summary as I think we're all done with walls of text here. But I think you actually captured it perfectly in your last remark:
> For my own solo projects, the ease of hosting for static sites is often such a big win for me that I'm willing to forego some interactivity even though more interactive features would be nice.
They make the web worse for the world by tempting the developer to take the easier, less interactive route than what would have been taken in the pre-SSG world.
I think I'm troubled by this because the idea "it makes it easy to do the lazy, worse thing" seems completely at odds with the fact that it seems to be what the people I would consider leaders in the field are doing. That's why I still wonder if this view might be a me problem, or maybe the field is just moving backwards? I don't know.
Anyway, thanks again!