Back in the day people used to build a website without any versioning. Just make it and upload it. Make a change, upload it again.

Then people realized why that's such a bad idea

Why should it be? In my experience it depends on the case, and in my case it seems like an absolute technological overkill to version the site and have statichost regularly pull from some repository, as I update it perhaps once a year.

I mean, versioning is basically free from a technical / storage / time spent standpoint, and my experience says that if you don’t do it you likely will lose your code at some point

To be fair you can have versions and backups even if you don't use a versioning tool like git. Good old _v2, _v3, _v4.

Fair, but like, why??

Simpler. Or you work/collaborate on projects with people who really shouldn't have to learn Git, even via a GUI.

I'm a programmer by trade and do plenty of versioning via _v1 and so on when working on music with others, we basically send .zip files over Telegram and append some label at the end. Not gonna ask these people to learn something when basic "have many copies" does the trick sufficiently good.

If you're making static websites, there's no code to lose.

Second order code loss: make a change, realize you screwed everything up, unable to revert

Is that why even Google Docs has version control?

I use Git for version control, but not for deployment because I don’t want to bother making a commit every time I want to fix a typo.

Not really, I just use Emacs' versioned backup files that are automatically generated. As I said, I don't have to update the site that often, so it is entirely sufficient. An advantage for me, besides not having to write Git commit messages, is that I also don't have to version images in Git, which I don't like doing.