This is a rambling article and is super hacky.
It is ONLY for self-hosted setups and won’t work with github pages. But it’s easy and it works 
https://thecrow.uk/comments-on-a-self-hosted-static-site-its-simpler-than-you-think/
Hopefully it’s useful to someone
Sorry / Not sorry
Interesting take. I haven’t used Disqus for comments but I can understand your custom process.
You use your access logs to get messages from users then manually add that to a YAML file and rebuild daily. (Covering that entire flow in the first line of the post would also be nice summary)
Some ideas for you.
One is that you could use a form that submits an email to you. Netlify has form feature builtin and they handle stuff like removing spam.
And the other thing is for a nicer experience on your current flow, instead of sending the user to
https://thecrow.uk/COMMENT your site sucks and I hate you so much. Just go away and die
You could send them to thank-you.html or comment-submitted.html and put the details in query params
https://thecrow.uk/thank-you.html?comment=your site sucks and I hate you so much. Just go away and die
And I would percent encode the URL in JS to convert spaces to %20. And newline, ?, #, etc. to encoded characters.
If you don’t want to check Apache, you could use Google Analytics to view the request URLs.
Again, You’re correct - I ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ now have a TL;DR at the top.
Your other suggestions are solid and may be taken up by someone else who stumbles across this thread. For me, I’m pretty happy