I really like the look of the default Publii theme, however some modifications weren't quite working using the in-app options. I wanted this website to have a very low level of interactivity, i don't need a mobile hamburger menu for 2 short entries (code & life).
So I started looking for a different theme but I couldn't find what I was looking for, that is, a minimalist theme. I resolved to just strip things away from the default theme to make it lighter and JS free.
Opening the default theme gave me the same feeling that I got when trying to customize the code of a 40$ admin panel. Lots of code, neatly organized, most of it unused.
What is all this code, what is it for ? Oh, i can get rid of it.
I managed to strip down the source by removing the parts I wasn't interested in. I think now the design looks clean, and I got rid of most useless css and js I could find. I'm not sure that this is the right approach, as those changes definitely won't survive a theme update (but why would I want to update it ?) and are a bit hacky. I'm pretty sure those changes are only stored on my machine, so if I try to edit the website from somewhere else it will revert back to it's default look.
However, i'm not too worried about this. This personal website is a playground for experimentation after all.