The site already existed, but they wanted to serve it statically to save on complexity and money.

If you dig into the repo you'll see that it's maintained using a YAML file, which is a smart way to deal with small sites that still contain structured content.

I do the same thing for my https://github.com/simonw/museums site.

Some possibilities come to mind:

1. because the people writing the content are not developers. 2. there’s dynamic content, but when you know you’re going to get a large influx of traffic from a single region/event, you can precompute it for a short period.

It's smart because it's a solution to a problem (freezing dynamic content) in one line of code, the wget command. It should work for most cases and it's easy to understand and deploy.