Looks like it's all mainly to do with the static site generation though. You can...

jordanrobinson on Sept 12, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Building a fast, secured and free static site in l...

Looks like it's all mainly to do with the static site generation though. You can certainly still dump some handmade html into a gh-pages branch and have a (non-generated) static site in less than ten minutes.