I used Gatsby (React and GraphQL included), MDX and TypeScript. You certainly don’t need these technologies to build a website. It would be a really bad idea for simple websites.
Thing is, I already knew that tech stack, it allows me to do some absurd things, like collecting bidirectional wikilinks inside my notes, and rendering them as an interactive graph; showing git history under my articles, etc.
And I enjoyed it. Would I recommend Gatsby and TypeScript for a travel blog? Probably not. It’s a great choice for something as big as TypeScript Website.
Read Overengineering a Blog by Andrew Branch. He pulled off something quite impressive.