you can tell when a site was built by hand.
it's not about the technology — vanilla js vs react, static vs dynamic, none of that. it's whether the person who made it touched every part of it.
hand-built sites have small inconsistencies that are clearly intentional. template-built sites have inconsistencies that are clearly accidents. you can tell the difference instantly. you don't have to think about it.
the canonical example for me right now is konsti.club. the whole site is a fake old PC booting up. it dials in, runs a fake POST, gives you a boot menu of skinned operating systems. the code comments are self-aware ("yes i could just array cycle these. it's 5am, lemme be"). every choice was made by a person.
the goal here is to be in that lineage.