I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here.

I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.

The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.

I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.

It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.