Yes, it looks pretty cheesy, almost back to 1996, but there's a purpose. I'm exploring how to setup a jekyll dev env and push to github-pages. It's a bit quirky, but fun.
Liquid Syntax is new to me, but just another (templating) language.
Interesting side note: Shopify created itI'm just experimenting with "JAM Stack" (JavaScript, API, Markup/down) or as some suggest, "MASH Stack" (Markup/down, API, Static Hosted)
The simplified concept is that front end content is "static", meaning, the content is pre-built then pushed to cloud storage/CDNs. Don't confuse 'static' with do-nothing presentation only content, rather, javascript and API calls can make the content dynamic.
The big difference is that with the **OLD** web server model, pages were rendered by calling a backend db, which is overkill, and didn't scale well.
Check Out Jamstack.org