So Quarto it is … after the 3rd time trying to update Wowchemy and Hugo and things breaking - time for something new … Quarto “Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc” …
And things have been really smooth … some basic setup of the quarto page, converting the .Rmd files I had to .qmd files (which have very similar syntax) and then! quarto publish netlify
which simply pushes everything into a new Netlify repo - it can’t get much easier than that!