Love this :)
Small, related anecdote: back in the year 2001 or so, this is in the same family of how I built websites...
The difference is I wrote in in C as Apache Modules. So, like, most people were using other people's C modules (like PHP or CGI), but once you dug deeper and you wrote your logic/site _as_ a C module, it was so much more fun (and powerful too).
I didn't have much of a templating language, so the answer to "can we change the text on this page?" was usually, "sure, just give me a few minutes to recompile the whole Apache server" :D
Fun times