zim-desktop-wiki VS neuron

I'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com

Have you considered neuron or it's successor emanote?

It requires the neuron binary to be installed.

You can use vim-plug (or whatever) to get neuron.nvim, but neuron.nvim depends on neuron, which AFAICT, you have to pull from the GH Releases page or use nix to install: https://neuron.zettel.page/install.

zk also interoperates with neuron (of which I'm the author!).

https://neuron.zettel.page :: CLI+webUI

You can set up a git repo and use emanote or it’s predecessor nueron to set up the GitHub pages for free. But both projects have some issues rendering the Obsidian flavor markdown files (translutions, block reference etc.) compared with Obsidian Publish.

I use https://neuron.zettel.page/ for long lived things, and things I want to explore more visually. It has great emacs support, stores everything in .md, and auto generates the same site as what you can see on their website.