I've been doing a bit of research to see what blogging engines exist that are in between WordPress (which is kind of a bloated mess) for running a small blog and Hugo and other static site generators which don't have web based UIs and a few other features.

An interesting one that's a minimalistic blogging engine but still not quite static site generator level minimalistic is Bludit. It looks like a very minimalistic blog that's just that doesn't have like a lot of extra features or bloat to it. It supports markdown.

It's not a static site generator but it has a flat file data structure to it so it's easy to backup because it doesn't have a MySQL database and there's not kind of that extra bloat of a MySQL database running on your server. That's either you have to tolerate more RAM usage or break containerization by using a kind of shared MySQL across all services on your server. So it looks like a pretty good option. I haven't replaced Hugo with it on my blog yet but it's a very interesting minimalistic blogging engine from what I can tell and how I've experimented with it a bit so far.