By following trend tags etc you are trying to copy what the big players ARE doing. What you should be doing instead is what they WERE doing when they weren't big.
Focus on SOMEone before going for EVERYone.
If you are small and try to reach everyone, you're spreading yourself too thin to reach anybody at all. And reaching a small group already gives you a tiny playing field to accidentally go viral one day.
[+1] Writing HTML by hand is a modern day equivalent of writing entire apps in assembly / bash script. Great to make yourself feel better about knowledge, but amount of edge cases, compatibility issues, SEO requirements etc. makes it very inefficient.
CMS - yes, maybe.
SSG - not really. Doing all the modern SEO optimisations and HTML-quirks by hand can be tiresome and is, certainly, unnecessary. Static site generators take a lot of these chores of your hands and make work much faster.
(1) Jekyll:
+ Great if you have 0 programming experience
+ Extremely quick idea-to-launch time, all you have to do is read a few intro guides and plug in Markdown
+ Wide-spread support, plugins, guides etc
+ Simple enough for portfolio websites, flexible enough to build entire products (with a friend we built a mailing SaaS using only Jekyll + some javascript, also a few other projects)
- Architecture-wise it is a bit too "flat" for very big projects
(2) Gatsby:
+ A lot of plugins, support, great community
+ Not very simple, but allows you to do everything from websites to SPA webapps (pretty much entire https://wtlstudio.com runs on it to generate SEO for websites)
- Only if you have JS/Node experience, or willing to learn React
- Can take a bit of time set it up, since you are actually going to do some programming