I use Hugo, it's not super complicated.
You basically just define templates in pseudo html for common content (header, nav panel, footer, etc), and then you write your articles in markdown and Hugo combines the two and outputs actual html files.
You also have a content folder for js, css, and images which get output as is.
That's about all there is to it, it's a pretty minimalist static site generator.
Hosting wise you can just put it on github pages for free.
I've been looking for th8s for awhile too.
Not a locally run tool, but a self hosted web app (that I wire up to my self hosted db) that has a web portal I login to, and then can manage my db with a nice slick UI to define tables, relations, etc.
There's been some I've found but they vastly lacked basic features and were clearly in very early beta.