Reasons:

• The content is mine either way — both ship static HTML, both render Markdown. That’s a wash.
• Hugo gives me taxonomies and section routing for free. Bearblog has tags but no per-section taxonomy. Splitting poems into telugu/english/sanskrit subpages is 6 lines of Hugo template; on Bearblog I’d have to hand-roll three list pages.
• The deploy is already free. Cloudflare Workers + a git push is cheaper than Bearblog’s $6/mo (which is fair, but I’m cheap).
• I want a custom feed split. Bearblog gives you one RSS per blog. I want three (home / raw / links). Hugo lets me scope rss.xml to the section.
• Comments are still self-hosted (Remark42 on Fly). No lock-in to move.

What I copied from Bearblog’s design language: the typography, the dark/light toggle, the no-sidebar minimalism, the “this is one person’s writing” feeling. Those are theme choices, not platform ones.