In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was up to the web browser how to render the markup in an HTML document. The whole specification was refreshingly simple. You could easily read it in one sitting…
Ah yes, div soup.
By the way, have you tried different generators and compared them, or tried only Hugo, out of curiosity?
Only Hugo; I didn’t want to try anything JS based and hugo is faaaaaast in its generation. Sub 1 second fast. It’s so nice.