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”?
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.
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.