I use Pelican (https://getpelican.com/) for my blog, which works decently for me. It is a static site generator written in Python.
But you probably won't learn much Python by using it (or Rust when using a generator written in it) since you probably won't need to change anything in it.
The only Python code you need to write for Pelican is the configuration, which is just setting a few variables.
Pelican was one of the options I had in mind too; will consider it more seriously thanks to your recommmendation!
You know, I was wondering about that myself. I guess one of the selling points of these frameworks/products is their ease of configuration, which might mean very minimal hacking required, if any. So it's entirely possible I may not get to learn very much Python this way. Thanks for sharing your experience!
But you probably won't learn much Python by using it (or Rust when using a generator written in it) since you probably won't need to change anything in it. The only Python code you need to write for Pelican is the configuration, which is just setting a few variables.