Back in the 90s I was working on a commercial server-side rendering "content management solution". Revision control and team workflow (with quite nice conflict resultion UIs). Templating using XSLT (sadly, because it's insane). Super expressive and solid stuff in general though. We used the actual cvs binary as a version control backend.

I left this part of the business space for the browser business at this time, but I assumed that the server-side rendering stuff would keep evolving. It didn't.

Then the "PHP CMS" wave came, and dumbed everything down.

Then the "reduce the server to an API" and "let insanely complex javascript frameworks/apps deal re-invent the browser navigation model" came... and here we are.