Put a CMS behind a well-configured CDN and it's essentially a static site generator. If you have cache invalidation figured out, you get all the speed and scalability benefits of a static site without ever having to regenerate your content.
I’m guessing it didn’t have much in front of it because the management endpoints were accessible from the public Internet. I think you mentioning the “well configured CDN” is key here. If there was a CDN in front of it, it wasn’t well configured.
BTW, I spent a lot of my career configuring load balancing, caches, proxies, sharding, and CDNs for Plone (a CMS that’s popular with governments) websites.
Yeah sorry, I didn't mean to imply these folks have any clue what they're doing. I misread your comment as "it's been a while since I saw a CMS-based site, big sites are all static now" instead of "it's been a while since I saw a CMS rawdogging it."
