If you don’t want to maintain the infrastructure, you can also just commit to git and push to GitHub, and there have CI build the Hugo/Jekyll website and host it using GitHub pages.
You can easily have your own domain connected to it and GitHub will provide an SSL certificate.
If you don't want to maintain infrastructure, don't adopt the kinds of software stacks created by the kinds of people who have only ever shown a giddiness for producing devops shovelware that assumes/requires maintenance.
Even ignoring that, you run into stuff like this:
> the first wall I hit [trying to update the website] was that I: Forgot [...] the esoteric Hugo conventions (has documentation, but it's not easy to parse at a glance) [...] not sure how I could have remembered all of the Hugo-isms, especially since I don't update this site very often and don't do static site generator work outside of this.
Nothing about this sort of thing is unforeseeable. Don't choose these options.
You can easily have your own domain connected to it and GitHub will provide an SSL certificate.