I like Hugo quite a lot, but I don't like Go's standard library templates. I wonder if it is possible to use https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate with Hugo?
Zola [1] was created exactly for this reason. It even says so in the Readme. The templates are based on Jinja though, not mako. They also claim that their CLI is intuitive and documentation is good. I certainly found it more comprehensible than Hugo's.
[1] https://www.getzola.org/