When I was heading up reliability at Netflix, we considered, and even began evaluating, turing the whole thing into one big static site. Each user had a custom listing, but generating 60+ million static sites is a very parallelizeable problem.
At the time, the recommendations only updated once a day, but an active user would have to dynamically load that content repeatedly, and at the same time, the recs were getting updated for users who hadn't visited that day. By switching to static, we could generate a new static site for you every time you watched something (which could change your recommendations), and increase reliability at the same time, so it would have been a much better customer experience. Unfortunately we couldn't get enough of the frontend engineers to buy into the idea to get it off the ground, and also they were already well along the path to having a data pipeline fast enough to update recs in real time.
At the time, the recommendations only updated once a day, but an active user would have to dynamically load that content repeatedly, and at the same time, the recs were getting updated for users who hadn't visited that day. By switching to static, we could generate a new static site for you every time you watched something (which could change your recommendations), and increase reliability at the same time, so it would have been a much better customer experience. Unfortunately we couldn't get enough of the frontend engineers to buy into the idea to get it off the ground, and also they were already well along the path to having a data pipeline fast enough to update recs in real time.