webR-quarto-demos VS hugo-blox-builder

Have seen similar reports in the past about Academic, such as https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/hugo-academic-adapting-old-hero-widget-css-custom-code/31611 and the related https://github.com/wowchemy/wowchemy-hugo-themes/discussions/2213 (and this particular oddity illustrates perfectly why growing numbers of Hugo afficionados think the “themes-first” approach of Hugo documentation is flawed) — but, of course, none of that helps you now. Does your project have a public repository for viewing, since the Academic documentation is (as you say) unhelpful?

If you're building a personal website from scratch in 2021 (especially a blog), I strongly recommend Hugo over Jekyll. I had used Jekyll for a decade and very often hit random quirks that have been completely eliminated with modern Hugo. However, there's a bit of a migration process if you are moving from Jekyll to Hugo despite both being Markdown-based blogs.

If you want a more advanced framework for a personal website, I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/) on top of Hugo, which gives the tools needed out-of-the-box like lazy loading/SEO/object-oriented collections, albeit with a massive learning curve.