If you want to go as minimal as possible, my https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo gets you set up with a single no-CSS, no-JS HTML page. I found this pretty ideal for staying to learn the platform.
If you really, really like minimalism, you could also try pandoc-server to dynamically serve HTML files from your Markdown as people visit the page, just like PHP does: https://pandoc.org/pandoc-server.html