hey, I very much understand the pain as I was trying a couple of static site generators like 11ty, hugo etc, and all of them are rather bloated and not very intuitive for custom usage.
I looked at your specific question and I think it can work with some tags setup, but then it will probably require some extra JS.
What I can also suggest is to go with markdown and then convert MD to HTML, you can use shell script as starbreaker suggested but I can also recommend just writing one simple JS file where you can use default node fs to list all the files (then you can create an index file to access all pages in the directory) and convert MD with some simple npm package and then just save all results. Then just add some simple css on top to make it look nicer than pure HTML. I bet it can be a very short script tbh.
that's a pretty smart idea actually, using node.js to create index files. i'm going to look further into this and see what i can come up with!