That doesn’t sound bloated enough. Too fast. Gonna give a user whiplash.

We could just enable auto-index and drop a bunch of .txt files into it.

We are, but throwing the static HTML on a global CDN (like CloudFlare Pages/Workers, Netlify, Firebase Hosting, etc) makes things easier (nothing to maintain) and ensures that if we end up popular on HN or Reddit, there is no hug of death because the scale is infinite. Also, all of those have very generous free tiers, so it can cost nothing.