I picked Quartz over a hosted service because the source stays plain markdown in my own vault, it builds to a static site I can host anywhere for free, and it still gives me real blog features: a chronological feed, tags, RSS, backlinks, graph view, and client-side search.
“Static” here only means there’s no backend rendering pages per request — the site is still interactive in the browser (search, graph, theme toggle all run as client-side JavaScript).