It started with
Thought
"Wow, I never downloaded the database for my old site! It should still be around untouched, but I have no idea when I even made a backup of it."
First discovery
Phew, the database looks intact and unchanged! As it should be, but you never know.
Second discovery
Oh look, there is a convenient export menu. And JSON is an option.
Creation
How many lines of Javascript it takes to parse that one JSON blob and generate individual HTML pages plus an index?
19.
Operations like this make it clear how outrageously fast and powerful modern computers are. Parsing just over 6 megabytes of JSON, looping through 1810 elements, wrapping their content in the barest HTML, and writing them all plus the index to disk - using freaking Node.js - takes literally no time at all.
Moving 1811 files to trash, however, is outrageously slow by comparison, taking multiple seconds. What exactly is Macos doing there?
Anyway, great fun!