I made another small experiment source to do my blog yet another way; rather than using hugo static site generation, I can leverage Caddy server's built-in template rendering and markdown support to serve markdown files 'directly' without a pre-build step.
In the end though, I will probably stick with static site generation. It offers some performance and security improvements such as no templating time, no possibility of vulnerabilities in the templating engine, in return for a little extra complexity having a build-step.