Clearly I mean Garage in here when I write "S3." It is significantly easier and faster to run hugo deploy and let it talk to Garage, then to figure out where on a remote node the nginx k8s pod has its data PV mounted and scp files into it. Yes, I could automate that. Yes, I could pin the blog's pod to a single node. Yes, I could use a stable host path for that and use rsync, and I could skip the whole kubernetes insanity for a static html blog.
But I somewhat enjoy poking the tech and yes, using Garage makes deploys faster and it provides me a stable well-known API endpoint for both data transfers and for serving the content, with very little maintenance required to make it work.
In the context of my comments here, any mention of "S3" means "S3-compatible" in the way that's implemented by Garage. I hope that clarifies it for you.