How can I escape this markup and break the curse of this haunted post?

So, I made a cursed post this morning. In the process of trying to document something I did in Jekyll, I made Hugo very cross. Here’s the complete post in a gist to keep this post tidy.

Here’s the error that Hugo threw during build:

2022-05-16 09:46:18: Error: Error building site: "/pdxmph_7c1f93/content/2022/05/16/094617.md:10:1": failed to unmarshal YAML: yaml: line 9: did not find expected key

@help suggested the problem seemed to be with this line:

<a href="{{image.name}}" data-lightbox="gallery" data-title="{{image_data.description}}"><img src="{{image.name}}_thumb.jpg" alt="{{image_data.description}}" class="rect-img" /></a>

As in the gist, it’s indented and should render as a code block.

Side effects of the curse: That error message, the post failing to be posted, every single page on my site returning a 404.

Solution for now: I just put the parts of the blog that will kill Hugo in a gist and will embed it.

Is there any way to get Hugo to not have so much trouble with this?

Have you tried using a fenced code block instead of indentation? I have found indentation to be problematic when using {{ in particular, which Hugo wants to process.