I use Hugo a lot and it is great.

I do wish they concentrated more exclusively on the static generation side of the house though as we don't use the "live server" stuff at all and in my opinion that is a distraction.

I disagree, the live server is super practical. Are you sure it takes a lot if energy to the dev BTW?

I especially like Hugo plugged with Netlify CMS. Free, powerful, and robust.

The learning curve is steep but it worth it.

Only caveat though: the "Bus factor" is very low and it's sometime intimidating to contribute on the Github tracker

While I agree that the capability is technically practical, I feel there are plenty of good file system watcher based web servers. I can't say at all what level of effort goes into maintaining this feature, but in my opinion is is bloat that can be handled by other tools.