A research institute’s website should look like a research institute. That is harder than it sounds: most static-site frameworks ship with opinionated landing-page idioms — heroes, gradients, big animated buttons — that pull the output toward SaaS regardless of what you write into them.
Astro is closer to a typesetter than a framework. It composes plain HTML, CSS, and Markdown without forcing a runtime onto the page. We ship one wordmark animation on the home page, a font file, and a few kilobytes of CSS. Everything else is text.
The constraint is the point. If a future feature requires a single-page-application shell, that is a signal we have started writing software, not publishing memos.