I can only assume that, while you do actually have some appreciation of concepts like separation of concerns and network-based computing, you're ignoring them completely for the purpose of advancing an argument which, to those of us with extensive professional experience in such matters, is every bit as ignorant as it's suffused with utterly unwarranted condescension.

Either that, or you're assuming that, because this thread revolves around a toy project which pushes literally all the work off to the client, any project of any sort which does likewise must also do exactly likewise. Granted that I'm not sure how such an assumption could possibly survive even a moment's consideration, but it seems a plausible origin for your misapprehension here, and so I feel constrained to mention it all the same.

Either way, my experience has been that clients vastly prefer to see their CPU activity bump a little above idle every now and again, in exchange for a responsive and reliable user experience, rather than find themselves in a situation where, thanks to a developer who assumes today's web browsers must be on the same level of capability as the IBM-3270-with-pretty-pictures style of fifteen years ago, the server's so wound around the axle, trying to do work its clients could do faster and better, that it's unable to respond to HTTP requests at all.

"But," you might sneer, "that's a problem on the backend! Do it right the first time and you don't have this problem!" Welcome to real life, where legacy code exists, and where a rewrite from scratch often isn't an option -- especially when the budget for it would have to come from a contract client who's already on a shoestring, and whose operations are funded by registrations completed through their website.

In one example from a past professional engagement, the proposition I might've made would've reduced to approximately this: "I know you're facing bankruptcy because your athletes have grown frustrated with poor response and taken their registration fees to better-managed events," I might say, "but how about paying us fifteen grand to build you a completely new website from the ground up? It'll work great!"

Perhaps you can conceive of a world in which such a suggestion would go over well. If so, I applaud the floridity and scope of your imagination, which must be truly unparalleled.

Here in reality, we must cope as best we can with the situations in which we find ourselves. Oftentimes, that means finding some way in which the client can do part of the work -- specifically, as in the case I describe, that part which is intimately bound up with the particular user's unique experience, and whose result therefore doesn't generalize no matter where it's handled.

Lest we lose track of the topic, the "static site generator" under discussion is, I grant, a very poor example of my thesis, because the work it pushes off to the client could very well be done on the server, or indeed could be done once as a compilation step and the result served statically to all comers -- it's a cute toy, but nothing I'd ever expect to see anywhere near production. But, as I said before, to attempt to generalize, from this toy project, to every case in which some work is offloaded to the client, redoles most strongly of arrogance, ignorance, and foolishness.

I mean, I can appreciate that, when your major professional concern at the moment is apparently a website dedicated to giving stoners an idea of which strain of cannabis provides the best high, you probably don't have to worry much about scaling and offloading, and that's fantastic! But some of us find ourselves forced by circumstance to operate in a less utterly trivial sphere.