I’m still not seeing what you’ve “set straight”.

Jekyll is about taking a few bytes of text and turning them into the multi-megabyte-monstrosity that a website is nowadays expected to be. A real hacker responds to that trend Nancy Reagan style. "Just say no".

The post you're commenting on was generated by Jekyll. The data transferred on a cold load is 70.76 KB. Most of that is a TypeKit font.

It's still five times times less data transferred than the Stallman microblog you linked.

No, that only happens if you choose to make it a multi-megabyte monstrosity. My website, which uses Jekyll, has a home page that is under 10 KB uncompressed. It's just a HTML page and two CSS files: https://saagarjha.com

Looking at the source of TFA, it seems it downloads a 5.3kb html file, two css files adding up to 2.9kb, and 11.9kb of javascript. (Including GA, alas)

Not as slim as possible, but pretty darn small. My personal blog, using an even older command-line html templating engine (nanoblogger) weighs in at 3kb html, 1.8kb css, and a princely 13.7kb of js. (All from the code formatter I use)

Jekyll is design-agnostic.