have you seen/heard of a web cms that uses 'folders as database' paradigm?
@luka Apache with "Options Indexes" and custom style sheet ?
I wrote one in 2004 like this (on IIS using ASP)
There was an "default.asp" that did a prettified directory listing (ignoring particular files, and if some specific files existed you could use them to override or add to the default header/footer/navigation bar.
To publish you just mount the webroot as a file system and copy in your stuff, and you can control publishing access with file system acl's to particular users and groups.
@luka needless to say it is a terrible security hellhole .. allowing people to shovel files into the directory tree and ask the web server to execute them.. though that could maybe be fixed.
@luka @kat somewhat related by the blurb generation feature: https://ordecon.com/2020/07/pandoc-as-a-site-generator.html. I use a modified version of this for my own site now and it's pretty fun, but I temporarily removed the blurb part.