I might be old fashioned but this seems like something static site generators shouldn’t do.
I can see how someone is grabbing it and regenerating content on data change and then if data changes often enough you are back to dynamic templating engines. Then nagging how awful it is for such use case and staring to build „new thing” that was already in RoR or else.
If you have data in a database most likely better to use RoR or whatever else you fancy.
But hey this might still be useful for some one off jobs.
If your dataset isn’t large, and your change cadence isn’t too fast - it works well.
I use it at BLR.today, where I curate events happening in Bangalore. The dataset updates roughly 4 times a day, and generating 100 pages 4 times a day is simpler than running an always on server.
The endgame for me would be to roll this into running a Jekyll-lite engine on the edge, against a SQlite database locally available to the edge compute.