Been also looking at Static Site Generators as a solution – 11ty in particular. It uses node.js. Node.js is something I could see myself getting into. The idea of a Static Site Generator, is interesting to me. So much bloat in WordPress. I found there are many choices.
This caused me to look into a way to convert the WordPress xml export. Found a few that said they converted to markdown. One that was mentioned a few times did not work for me, so I opened an issue for it. In my case, after further search, only blog2md worked! It was recommended it this article. The author also said “There are a few tools available but personally, only one of them worked: blog2md“. This particular utility prepares the markdown for import into Hugo (which may also be an interesting option), but at least it does most (the hardpart) of the work. This conversion alone is a valuable service because for a human, the WP xml isn’t easy to digest. My conversion produced 437 markdown posts. It also included images!