What are people using to publish "digital gardens"? I wanted something with "live" updating that didn't require me to set up overly complicated scripting on github and so went with Notion, however, I find Notion doesn't get properly indexed on Google, even when the option to allow search engine indexing is turned on for every page. My efforts to get support from Notion about this have failed. (They keep telling me to turn this option on, no matter how many times I tell them that it is already on!) Other options out there?

Not sure what all of your criteria are, but Obsidian's offering would be an obvious contender if you're willing to pay for it:

https://obsidian.md/publish

Speaking of which, this response from an Obsidian dev about issues with search engine indexing might be relevant to your issue with Notion:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/search-engine-visibility-for-obsidian-publish/20386/7

Thanks. I actually moved from Obsidian to Notion because it had live updating without needing to "save" changes and some other features I liked...

Yes, seems that the lack of sitemaps is the problem. From other forums it seems the best solution is to use some CloudFlare hacks to host Notion under my own domain name and provide a sitemap. A bit complicated though... (And I'm debating whether to do this with Notion, or Craft since if you are doing these hacks you can do the same thing with Craft instead...)

Makes sense. Other offerings I'm aware of that offer live updating are NotePlan and Amplenote.

(Notabase is working on a publish feature, but it's not available yet.)

I don't know if these solutions for hosting Notion and Craft under your own domain name solve the search indexing problem or not?

https://fruitionsite.com/
https://zuolan.me/craft_custom_domain_en

Fruition says it supports SEO so that seems promising...

So I installed the Fruition script and things are sort of working, but not the way they are supposed to. Google is indexing a few pages, but I can't get Fruition's sitemap feature to work properly. Not sure why. There is a sitemap, but it doesn't contain any links other than the first page... Will continue to try to see if I can get things working but thought I'd share my initial experience.