A personal portfolio is not a product dashboard: traffic is bursty, expectations are high, and you still want the page to feel instant on a cold load. Prerendering with SvelteKit gives me HTML that matches what crawlers and link previews expect, without pushing complexity onto visitors.
RSS and sitemaps stay honest because every post is a real route with a stable slug. When I add syndicated items from other feeds, they merge into the same list at build time, so the site map and feed stay in sync with what the UI shows.
The tradeoff is discipline: environment variables for origins, images sized for Open Graph, and a build that stays green in CI. That is a small price for URLs I am willing to put on a résumé for years.