There was a blog post called Hugo theme from scratch: the absolute minimum and there was a discussion of it on Lobste.rs. What I take away from the post and the discussion is that for people who haven’t been using Hugo since 2016, it’s hard to read the docs and know where to start.
One issue is that gohugo.io is mostly a “reference” site and the “tutorial” part is a bit thin. Is there any interest in thinking through how we could help new Hugo users get up to speed?