It's hand written. This was also an early web thing: no npm build pipeline. I feel a little bad not making the modal view fallback to image-is-a-link when JS is disabled (I also would've opted for no google fonts, but it ultimately isn't my site)

Meanwhile another friend built a similar site: https://kaeillustrates.art which may have more of that Gen-Z aesthetic (albeit we're millennials, so it doesn't go overboard) & is built on tailwind/react

Hopefully minimalist-as-fashion design will go away & minimalist sites can return to being small memory/dependency footprint