Why does one need any server side code to run a simple website or a blog? Just browsing through the site it seems to be just links to articles and blog posts.

Why does one need any server side code to run a simple website or a blog? Just browsing through the site it seems to be just links to articles and blog posts. All of that could be "pre-compiled" into plain old HTML pages and pushed to something like github pages and you wouldn't need to worry about DNS, the server or any of the software running in the stack.