It sounds like you've really gone deep into these things, or maybe I'm just easy to impress.
Ha, let's go with the former :)
I started with Wordpress, like most people, back when MySQL was the thing to use and PHP wasn't something you muttered in shame and self-loathing.
Dynamic database driven websites though are absolutely terrible for both security (put a server on the 'net and you get endless probes of bots looking for php + mysql vulnerabilities) and also performance - assembling the pages on demand each time is akin to storing your car dismantled in the garage and putting it together every time you want to go for a drive.
That's why caching plugins are essential for wordpress but then you end up with caching issues and more plugins to manage and upgrade (plus the core software to protect against the endless vulnerabilities).
Static generators like Jekyll were a solution to that - just generate a static site (when you actually make changes to your pages) which is then incredibly cheap to host (like "free" cheap) and is far easier to secure and scale. A static site is always faster than a dynamic one.
Jekyll is built on a complex stack though, I prefer Hugo as it's just a single binary to install and run.
But what I don't like about either of them is that they are "offline" and run on your computer so you need to backup / store your content (you also need to manage backups for wordpress of course). I found I blogged less when I used them which is why I wrote my own - it's like Hugo but runs in the cloud so you can still edit from anywhere via a web-interface like Wordpress (actually more like Ghost) but the site is then generated and served-up as static pages, all auto-scaled, auto-image optimization and so on.
Ghost is interesting - it's like they created a simpler version of Wordpress but built it all on the same fundamental design (relational database, dynamic page creation) which is probably why it's crazy expensive - hosting costs go up for that and they have a server-per-site setup from the looks of things.
I'm hoping to make my blogging available for other people to use at some point, already have 3 people using it and it's working well.