I took that approach with a high traffic site about 10 years ago. The property was mostly write once content from official staff writers with social engagement,

I took that approach with a high traffic site about 10 years ago. The property was mostly write once content from official staff writers with social engagement, comments, follows and light user generated content, etc. It was built originally with Ruby on Rails and over time had lots of layers of caching. Eventually I moved to a system of partial caching which was stored on the file system and nginx would use SSI to reassemble the partials into complete pages. All dynamic content would be loaded secondarily via javascript with mustache templates and lots of in memory json caches. It would even rsync the file system across a handful of hosts which turned out to be a pain in the butt - then distributed file systems were probably less mature than they are now so I never ended up implementing but did much research. Funny, I think probably all of the above would be trivial now on AWS or Cloudflare.