This was interesting to read. I recently changed from Drupal to WordPress and now I'm thinking something more static would be better. Good to know all my options.
You can use Wordpress as a static site generator with some plugins. Basically run Wordpress on a local copy and flatten it out to static files for upload.
This is interesting. Can you link to tools that do this “flattening”?
Can one use wget -m for this? Or is there more to it?
Simply static is the one I've used, but wget can work, it's not optimized and may break in some edge cases.
Not OP but used SimplyStatic[0] to export flattened pages and assets. It’s still its own deploy process but you avoid a lot of security and site speed issues. You can specify root domain and allow/deny which URLs get exported.
The activation process uses freemius, which is a joke. I've been trying to activate for 2 weeks and still haven't been able to get it working, and their support is a joke. No shade on the plugin itself, just the third party licensing provider. The free Simply Static has worked great.