What blog sites have you seen or used that you would consider minimalist?
It's written in go but what's great about it, unlike many competitors written in Javascript or Python, is that it is just a simple binary you download and run, you do not need to get a PhD in the go build system to start a web site also it is crazy fast. It can publish a site to something like S3 or Azure Storage behind a CDN and you do not have to worry about anything other than paying the storage and bandwidth bills.
Myself I've been procrastinating on getting myself a blog and my take is Hugo is not customizable enough for me without learning a lot of Go, so I have looked at are either Python-based or oriented towards scientific publishing oriented systems such as
https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/
(I want to write stuff like https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...)
I've given this list to people in your shoes and they usually react with information overload
https://jamstack.org/generators/
part of that is that there are 355 generators (there have to be some good ones in there somewhere) but it also uses the kind of miscommunication patterns we're used to in webtech where, for instance, you'd think they are pushing Javascript down your throat (the "J" stands for Javascript but the generators I've mentioned generate mostly HTML with just a little Javascript.)
Pick something simple and run with it, if I did that 2 years ago I'd be blogging now.
I also really liked using Docsify for a while. For a personal blog, it works great.
My personal blog inspired by Medium.
your data are stored in your github repository. minimalist. support markdown.
There's a template to get you started really quickly: https://github.com/Wisp-CMS/nextjs-blog-cms-wisp