All of my projects in past 6 years have been built using React. With either Gatsby or Nextjs. Not that you need to understand what they are, but essentially it means that your projects are super secure (unlike WordPress), hyper fast and loading pages, extremely cheap to run and are easily scaleable.
What about animations?
Hell yeah! I love animations. As long as they're done in a way that benefit the user experience and storytelling journey. I use CSS / Styled-Components, GSAP, Framer Motion, Lenis & Spline.
What about managing content?
Easy. I'm a DatoCMS partner, and most websites can be built on the generous free plan. I would look at this with you to assess requirements based on the designs and let you know if there would be any costs involved.
What about hosting and SSL?
All free. I host with either Netlify or Vercel. If you're going over the limits that's when there will be a cost. After 6 years and 30 websites later, I'm yet to pay for hosting. So it really depends on your type of website, storage, data, etc.
Performance?
I aim for 90+ all greens on a lighthouse test. B+ on a GTMetrix test. I also aim to ensure that the FPS during scroll is above 60.
Bug testing and QA?
Of course, all this will be handled. Additionally, all bugs are fixed for free. Only new feature requests would incur an added cost.