If I see an admin panel I have to assume this would be server side rendered? I would never agree with that, and you're missing my point.

I am not suggesting any framework at all.

I'm 100% serious when I say that you will inevitably need a developer. As the requirements become more refined they're going to wind up writing everything on those web pages from scratch in plain CSS, HTML, and JS. Every attempt to avoid this is just wasting time and pissing everyone off regardless of their stake in it.

As an aside, I've knocked out at least half a dozen of these projects that I can remember in the past decade and I'm not even really a web dev. Doing it my way was faster, cheaper, more accurate, and way less long-term maintenance.

They were all for significant clients and are still running today. When they need maintenance it's done by developers who can effortlessly knock out the tickets because there are no dependencies in the way. There is no dedicated team. The client managers just toss some stories into the backlog and it goes into the next sprint assigned to whoever has the time. A merge in gitlab updates everything and we're done and everyone is happy and nobody ever has to think hard about this.

We just write static pages from scratch and avoid all server side rendering. There is no backend apart from maybe a few REST calls where needed and they're implemented as separate node apps. Again, minimal dependencies apart from Express and misc utils. They could probably be lambdas in AWS if we were allowed to do it that way. That's how non-existent the backend is and how static the pages are.

Am I just living in a corporate fantasy and don't know how good I have it? The only part where I think we agree is that these projects should be low tech, but we have very different ideas of what that means.

Also, the part where I mention marketing being a shit show clown circus is still true, but avoiding a CMS keeps that noise away from devs where it belongs while still delivering a good result. This assumes you have devs. If you don't I still think you need at least a single web contractor and would be better off avoiding a CMS or any other shitty framework. That's all I'm saying.