> I didn’t realize we differentiate between applications and sites these days.
I differentiate far more than that. Just as you wouldn't make the same tool choices for a throwaway, ten line script, a command line tool with five subcommands, and a full word processor, you can't expect to do the same for a website.
If what you need to do is put fixed web pages online, then a text editor and an SFTP client is exactly it. Write your HTML and CSS by hand and get on with life. It still works beautifully.
Just past that point is the uncomfortable place where you want to do some templating. And this is where it seems so simple just to hack together a quick script to do what you want that there are a million static site generators, and it's questionable if it's easier to write your own or learn how someone else has organized one. This is a place where no one has gotten it obviously right yet. I still use Hakyll because I got it working a while back and haven't been motivated to change. I've looked at Hugo and Jekyll. I've experimented a bit with writing my own. It's just not worth the effort.
At this point in time, the two things I think would be worth investigating in this space would be either precompiling web components to static HTML so you can use an existing standard that scales to web apps or going into something like Smalltalk and defining objects with content and metadata as objects in a live system then having the code generate output directly.