To new blogdown users: the current latest Hugo version 0.112.x series have some serious bugs and I’d strongly recommend against using these versions of Hugo. For now, the highest version of Hugo that you can use is 0.111.3, which you can install with:
blogdown::install_hugo('0.111.3')
# if you have installed higher versions, you can use
# blogdown::remove_hugo() to remove them
For old blogdown users, you don’t need to worry about anything because you
are likely to have already installed an older working version of Hugo, and
pinned it in your .Rprofile (if not, blogdown::check_site() can tell you
how).
In general, there is no need to upgrade Hugo if a certain version works fine for you.
Hopefully these Hugo bugs will be addressed in v0.112.4 soon.