I tried all the different static site generators, and I was annoyed with how everything was really complicated. I also came to the realization that I was never going to need a content management system with the amount of blogging I was doing, so I should stop overanalyzing the problem and just do the minimum thing that leads to more writing.
Great way to put it. One thing that I keep trying to hammer is that the "minimum thing" here looks more like "open up a word processor, use the default settings, focus on capturing the content—i.e. writing things out just as you would if you were dumping these thoughts into a plain text file or keeping it to, say, the subset of Markdown that allows for paragraph breaks, headings, and maybe ordered and unordered lists—and then use your word processor's export-to-HTML support to recast it into the format that lets use their browser to read it, and then FTP/scp/rsync that to a server somewhere".
This sounds like I'm being hyperbolic, and I kind of am, but I'm also kind of not. The process described is still more reasonable than the craziness that people (HN- and GitHub-type people) end up leaping into when they think of blogging on a personal website. Think about that. Literally uploading Microsoft Word-generated posts to a server* is better than the purpose-built workflows that people are otherwise coming up with (and pushing way too hard).
(*Although, just please, if you are going to do this, then do at least export to HTML and don't dump them online as PDFs, a la berkshirehathaway.com.)