I disagree, it's not overkill unless you make it overkill.

My update process is:

- Click a button to back up

- Click a button to update everything

- Open my blog to make sure it still looks normal

Definitely not onerous. To be fair I don't use many plugins, and my theme is very simple. I don't think a plain old blog doesn't need many plugins.

Sometimes I take a break from blogging. I don't want to have to read documentation on how my SSG works (either my own docs or docs on some website) to remember the script to generate the updates, or worry about deploying changes, or fiddling with updates that break my scripts, or anything like that. I do stuff like this for my day job.

I like my blogging experience to be focused on a single thing: writing.

You are running one of the most popoular PHP programs exposed to the internet. So on top of just writing you should probably schedule your regular check for CVEs and patches. And you should do this even if you're not blogging or on vacation.

Not a thing you'de need to do with a static website. If you're like: "Hey, I am not doing it right now and I am fine", consider that your warning. I have been hosting wordpress instances since wordpress existed and I know how things can go wrong with them.

I ran into the maintenance load of an SSG for my blog, and only just now switched themes over this rather than fixing the old theme (which had several customizations). In that theme swap, I think I lost all the productivity I gained from using the SSG over raw HTML.

One other productivity gain though is that if you end up switching SSG engines entirely, you still have your source files. Those could easily work with the next one, or at least leverage trying others out. If everything is baked into rendered HTML, it will be much more work.