BBEdit integrated some publish/checkin features as I understood it but you had to have enough CVS fu to manage some of it "outside" the tool.

(and, what I read suggests CVS was something you had to actually install on the MacOS of that day, from some repo or another, probably whatever proceeded XCode. the developer tool bundle?)

It was entirely normal to do FTP 15-20 years ago. The problem was, that FTP was bifurcated into two forms. "traditional" FTP with two channels one of which was a back call to the client and PASV mode which was the one which worked through firewalls better, where the server set up a path for the client to call into.

Maybe you never had these issues. I know a lot of people at the time (like me) fought with FTP services and connecting clients who couldn't enable PASV, or didn't know how to turn it on, or whose firewall admin wasn't up to speed with enabling things to make FTP work.

I forgot to note that the permission set needed to make XHTML and like functions work meant setting the execute bit on some uploaded content, sometimes. It wasn't adequate to just mark a file as .xhtml always, for things like SSI to work let alone CGI scripts. You can do that in FTP if you can issue the commands, or you can ask FTP to preserve state for you, but again from hazy memory CVS didn't always like chmod state of files checking things in and out.

My story takes place around 1999/2002-3. If I mis remember forgive me. I had already been working 17 years online by the late 90s, and this BBEdit stuff is now 20 years ago for me. I forget more than I remember.