alt Hacker News> i have a static website with a menu. keeping the menu synchronized over the half dozen pages is a pain
You can totally do that with PHP? It can find all the pages, generate the menu, transform markdown to html for the current page, all on the fly in one go, and it feels instantaneous. If you experience some level of traffic you can put a CDN in front but usually it's not even necessary.
that's the server side html generator i already mentioned. ok, this one is not large, but it still ties me to a limited set of server platforms that support running php. and if i have to write code i may as well write javascript and get a platform independent solution.
the point is, none of the solutions are completely satisfactory. every approach has its downsides. but most critically, all this complaining about people picking the wrong solution is just bickering that my chosen solution does not align with their preference.
my preferred solution btw is to take a build-less frontend framework, and build my site with that. i did that with aurelia, and recently built a proof of concept with react.