Your example could be done with directory of media files and metadata in JSON. JavaScript generates pages from the JSON file. Browsers can serve from the filesystem. It would need to be static since updating the JSON safely is hard since filesystem don't provide atomic guarantees.
If you wanted it writable or larger, you would need web server running API for accessing something like SQLite for database. Running a web server is super easy these days, single command.
Instead of thinking about how would remake hypermedia, come up with a JSON metadata schema that can be dropped in directory of multimedia. Then have JavaScript to render it. There are lots of people, me included, that would like that for our music and image libraries.