Even database queries aren't that slow on reasonable hardware, as long as the queries are simple. The problem appears once you have dozens of DB queries per page. It's really not a fair comparison to the site this topic is about, but for trivial queries you can easily get a few thousand requests per second out of Postgres on desktop hardware without any real tuning as long as the DB fits into memory.
But static content is of course still much faster and also much simpler.
But static content is of course still much faster and also much simpler.