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A question I get a decent amount is "why this weird thing?"
It's a fair one. It is is a weird thing and the "why" is not super apparent, even though the aesthetics are immaculate. Personally, the why is multifaceted. I love to slim things down to essentials, because it's almost always the extra trappings and nonsense that bog me down when I'm working. Making a switch to Markdown text for everyday writing has been tremendous for this and I tend to think of this small web stuff as "Markdown but for the Internet." No frills, and no risk of frills.
The second part comes somewhat from worry. On our current trajectory, production of technology is unsustainable, and in every sense of the word. I am confident before we know it, it will be very important to be able to repair the technology we have, and so much recent tech is built to be irreparable. I want the tools and skills to be built by then, because the computer and the Internet will be a big part of things. They will be totally different from what I am trying to do here and what we all do normally, sure, but a simple -nix box will always be an option and easy to maintain.
The third part has to do with bad Internet habits. Everyone talks about a loss of "places" online. We used to have sites we visited periodically, which hosted more-or-less static content. We didn't expect they'd update several times a day. I was happy when a site I liked gave me a new update once a week. My pattern now is: I'll visit a site I'm used to visiting, I'll look to see if there is something new, I'll go to another site, repeating the established process, and finally I'll circle back to see if the first one has posted anything new. I can spend a whole day doing this. The steady churn of ocial media makes this much easier and much worse. We live and die by the new-new on the modern web, but that's not the case here. I have my curated garden, and if I want it to survive, I shouldn't overwater it.