Yes, I think the point of saying "nothing clever going on" is to indicate that everyone can and should be doing this. It doesn't take some kind of Steve Wozniak to accomplish.
Sure, but this doesn't really do any of that. If you just ship an inlined static site it will be this fast. You don't need any real "technologies" to do this. You just need leadership who will push back on the marketers/PMs who want to ship an entire petting zoo of third-party analytics trackers and A/B plugins.
If they’re using a framework to automate “inlining static sites”, and configuring it to be as fast as possible - I’d call that clever.
Adding analytics scripts or A/B testing is actually still possible, and not precluded by this method. If you prefer to do this manually to prove a point to your marketing team, go right ahead. But please don’t put down actual good work, just because you have high standards for what is “clever”.
It’s good, it’s not particularly clever but as another comment says, that doesn’t really matter. Everyone should be doing this. It doesn’t have to be json payloads. We do the same with lazy loaded react components which are served directly from our cdn as needed. Probably not quite as efficient given react overhead but the effect is similar.
It's a good site, but nothing particularly clever going on.