I don't follow this. It's pretty hard to get any database to be as fast as serving a file off the disk, which is why caches on web servers are pre-rendered pages stored as files on the disk.
Filesystems are a great "database" for large quantities of information, as long as it doesn't change, and you don't need to do any queries on it. I think there is quite a lot of range between "reasonably small site" and "news site" for which static pages work well. You could even have a successful news site with static pages, as long as you didn't want things like comments and trending articles, because while there are lots of articles being created, news articles don't usually change.
Changing layout and themes, however, could be no fun with static files.
Lots of filesystems struggle with hundreds of thousands of tiny files. You also have to make sure that every tool you use can handle lots of files without blowing up. Searching without an index becomes difficult too.
Filesystems are a great "database" for large quantities of information, as long as it doesn't change, and you don't need to do any queries on it. I think there is quite a lot of range between "reasonably small site" and "news site" for which static pages work well. You could even have a successful news site with static pages, as long as you didn't want things like comments and trending articles, because while there are lots of articles being created, news articles don't usually change.
Changing layout and themes, however, could be no fun with static files.