If you do it as separate static pages, though (per the upstream comment: "I wonder if there's a better way than having everything on a single page with very little compartmentalization...") then you're no longer pushing all the content to the client at once. That limits the scope of the browser's built-in search to the current page, and thus necessitates the additional complexity to regain support for searching over all the docs.
It could even be faster because all the HTML markup can be left out for the search index.