Content experiment

In my mind I have this holy grail scenario for my personal site, and maybe for other side projects I might do in the future.

I want to have a degree of flexibility somewhat like a print magazine in terms of having article-specific design. Not exactly like a print magazine, obviously, but with a degree of control over layout, fonts and styles that goes beyond a standardised template or two.

I don't want to hand-code html pages every time, but I feel like there's a sweet spot where I can add stuff to my markdown files and style tags and whatnot.

For example, can I put nunjucks blocks, or eleventy components or whatever into an md file?

Maybe I can have a template that exposes content items to the page grid?

Why don't css columns work out to be equal heights when they have the opportunity? That's kind of annoying.