You can have a separate system, even a locally running desktop app do that. You can still have a database, complex HTML templating, and image resizing! You just do it offline as a preprocessing step instead of online dynamically for each page view.
Unfortunately, this approach never took off, even though it scales trivially to enormous sites and traffic levels.
I recently tried to optimise a CMS system where it was streaming photos from the database to the web tier, which then resized it and even optimised it on the fly. Even with caching, the overheads were just obscene. Over a 100 cores could barely push out 200 Mbps of content. Meanwhile a single-core VM can easily do 1 Gbps of static content!
Here's some rough scheme I came up with (I never implemented it, though):
1. Use github pages to serve content.
2. Use github login to authenticate using just JS.
3. Use JS to implement rich text editor and other edit features.
4. When you're done with editing, your browser creates a commit and pushes it using GitHub API.
5. GitHub rebuilds your website and few seconds later your website reflects the changes. JavaScript with localStorage can reflect the changes instantly to improve editor experience.
6. Comments could be implemented with fork/push request. Of course that implies that your users are registered on GitHub, so may not be appropriate for every blog. Or just use external commenting system.
So, essentially a site generated with Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages with Utterances [0] for comments and updated with GitHub Actions.
I don’t know if https://github.dev version of Visual Studio Code supports extensions/plugins, but if so, then there is also a rich text editor for markdown ready.
All that’s left would be an instant refresh for editing.
