Comment by atemerev

Indeed! Consider a simple brochure-style marketing page, which is often a good use case for static HTML. Such a page should be centered around content, and that content (photography, illustration, copy, animation, etc.) may need to be specially built for the page and may be expensive to produce. Everything has to fit together flawlessly, telling a compelling story while staying on-brand. Performance needs to be great. And if the page is generating much revenue, it is easy to justify spending even more money in optimizations if they are likely to improve conversion rates.

I realize this has nothing to do with the ridiculous situation described in the article, but I do think it's worth pointing out that $18k is not at all an inherently ridiculous amount of money to charge for a static HTML page. In some cases, it may not be nearly enough.