I’m all for minimalism, but I don’t think that has to be at odds with the site looking nice and clean. Lemmy is a good example of a site that looks pretty minimal, but also looks nice visually.
Maybe something like this? https://github.com/muxelplexer/marxists-org-dark-stylized
Better and consistent styling would definitely help, but it would be nice to have good search, better navigation, etc. It’d be great to take all the content from marxists.org and shove it into a modern content management system.
I have wanted to make “mirrors” of Marxist websites and port them to different formats and protocols. I will keep this in mind. Sounds like a fun project.