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The options available to the author are:

1. Manually add a link to every page on the site each time a new one is added.

2. Give up on hand-writing HTML and use a server-side templating system

3. Give up on having navigation on each page

4. Load the navigation through JavaScript

Given that they want to hand-write HTML, and they (presumably) want it to be easy enough for everyone to do, the JS options seems like a reasonable choice.

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3 seems like the sane option to me... That's what I remember most sites doing back in the day if they weren't going for 2. Have a top-level "directory" page with individual pages linking back up to it and to the homepage, rather than having pages that link to literally nothing at all.

That's my preference as well, but I can understand how someone might want a more complex design while still using hand-written HTML.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to put a link to a navigation page in the sidebar, but when available, use JavaScript to replace the link with the navigation page content.

Static site generators exist to solve this problem. No need for server-side rendering at all.

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