Build times can be annoying. I have a bicycle shop's website in Hugo, full generation takes about a few dozen seconds, upload using rsync easily a minute because of many nested directories with images. I ended up writing a script to only upload changed html and new images unless needed.
60s grandgeezer here. try waiting a week or two, to find out that your punched card batch job didn't even compile, let alone run, because of a single character typo you made. back to square zero.
But I do feel like there is a cost to using static site generators. Raw HTML is easier to work with if you aren't dealing with a lot of similar pages.