Completely understand. If this is helpful, the way Hugo works (and the way many static site generators work) is that you make a template for each kind of page that you want to appear in the final output. A typical blog might have, say, three templates: a template for the homepage (show a quick bio and your most recent posts), a list template (show all your post titles and links), and a post template (show one post at a time).
When you generate the site, your content will be processed through the templates. For a typivally sized personal site this happens in under 100ms.
In Hugo, when you initialize a new site, these templates will already exist for you, so you won't have to write them, though you can of course edit them. (The out of the box defaults also include other kinds of things you might or might not care about, like tags or categories.)
I created this 3-4 years ago, hacked on it some to get it where it is, which I tried not to be too crazy. But maybe I just munged it up somehow. Maybe I just need to start over again with the latest Hugo and get brained up. Hugo has nice documentation, but it fairly quickly goes from "put a few markdown pages here and run hugo" to "read the rest of the book". Which is probably just the nature of the beast.