Why org-mode?
For the uninitiated, org-mode isn't just a file format. It's a whole lot of tooling built into emacs to support this. I've been using it for over a decade and barely scratch the surface of what it can do 1.
I've gone through a whole list of static site generation tools, including having written a few of my own. I've tried a lot more. The closest that comes to what I like is pelican (which is what I'm currently using for my devlogs), though I enjoyed Hakyll2.
I also generally prefer Restructured Text to Markdown, though I end up writing a lot more markdown because that's the lingua franca of software development documentation. This leads to cases where I don't remember off the top of my head how to do something in ReST.
The downside to Pelican is that it's a Python pacakge. On a lot of systems, that means in order to build and install it, you have to jump into a virtual env (and tools like direnv make that easier).
org-mode in emacs is the perfect blend for me of personal knowledge management, publishing, and blogging. I don't have to leave my editor for any of it to work, it just does.
Footnotes:
Which is to say, I've gotten it to do the things that I want out of it; I've looked a lot of what it can do and decided I didn't need it.
I really like using Hakyll, however; it requires building your site generator customized for your site as a binary, and building Haskell programs is not fun. I didn't mind the language, did not like the tooling.