It has been a long time since I tried that, but it was never as simple as they claimed it to be.

Now that plugin became a service, at which point you might just use a WP host and let them do their thing.

Yeah, true. There are other options that might be better like https://wordpress.org/plugins/staatic/.

I think a crawler that generates a static directory from your site probably the best approach since it generalizes over any site. Even better if you're able to declare all routes ahead of time.