Payload CMS integration strategy for marketing site

[jinwood]

We're evaluating Payload CMS for our marketing website which includes our homepage, join flow, blog, and localised marketing pages. As a national brand with significant traffic, we want to make the right architectural decisions.
Our main consideration is understanding the implications of tight CMS-website integration. While we see potential benefits, we're carefully weighing the coupling to Payload.

Looking for community insights on:
What benefits have you found from bundling Payload with your website? Particularly interested in deployment simplicity, development workflow, and how it affects your team's productivity.
For those using Vercel, how's your experience deploying a bundled Payload + website setup? Any gotchas or recommendations around environment configuration, build process, or scaling?
If you've chosen to keep Payload separate, what performance trade-offs have you encountered? Curious about latency, caching strategies, and how you handle high-traffic scenarios.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!