I doubt people who want to avoid javascript will use a javascript based static site builder.

I made that choice, based on two completely separate wishes:

- "I want my visitors to be able to view this static page without enabling JS" and

- "I already know React, I might as well just write this in TSX"

See my other comment [0], it seems only JS based ones use stuff like composition of content while most others are template-based, which is not as powerful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358978

Isn't that a bit like saying that people who want small web pages wouldn't want to use hugo, as it's a 60 megabyte binary?

No not really. There is a large anti-javascript crowd who avoid anything and everything js based, and frameworks like Gatsby and NextJS require you to interact with js and its tooling.

With those two as the examples, I'd definitely agree with that. I'd regard both as frontend frameworks and I've never heard Next described as a SSG, though, but Gatsby seems to be used as such by fans of reckless overengineering (because I definitely need GraphQL for my blog).

Eleventy would be quite a bit closer to Hugo/Zola, but even then you'd have to use npm/npx to install and run it.