The person you're replying to didn't mention a static site generator. You could simply use Vinyl(fka Varnish), and after you pulled your PHP down, your boring brochure site would still be up.

The first site I put up professionally was a handrolled static generator written in PHP for a state website. Users just edited text files, triggered a rebuild, and then there was a sync to prod if staging looked fine. They could even add new sections by creating new subdirectories, and Imagemagick would automatically conjure new menu buttons and the code would put them in the right place.

> Pushing that to a local tool means now you need to somehow synchronize that content across all of the end users devices without git.

This is not hard. Rsync? Rsyncd?

> Not to mention if there is no server side component

Why would there be no server-side component? What does that even mean? Just give them a script to trigger if you don't want them to have permission to do anything. Give them another script to revert if you don't want to get any emergency calls.

This is not advanced technology. Weird to talk about it like it's impossible.

> never useful or actually serious

So strange. That site was so simple to deal with that it stayed up for a decade after I left. Ancient technology.

> Users just edited text files, triggered a rebuild, and then there was a sync to prod if staging looked fine.

Thanks for proving my point.

> This is not hard. Rsync? Rsyncd?

How do I do that on an iPad or an Android?

> Just give them a script to trigger if you don't want them to have permission to do anything.

uhhh, what permissions does that "script" have? or is that your /wp-admin equivilent?

> So strange.

Indeed.