I read this as a question of whether a generalist can do the job of a specialist.

Whilst a lot of things in SEO are arguably just being neat and in-keeping with commonplace best practices, it remains that considering how obvious and common these consideratiozs are they do not really create any sort of advantage in the market.

Anticipating what are going to be the most impactful of the more mature tactics is where an expert comes into play, allowing you to leverage their skills, experiences and training to avoid waste and get straight to the stuff that works.

Technically speaking of course you can. The issue with this train of thought is the waste.

By not building it right the first time you waste time on the first iteration, potentially re-building or throwing away code and resources.

By sending live a site which is not optimised you waste creating a positive impression with search engines whilst the site is new. Depending on the issue, this can take quite a long time to unpick/solve (Google [Discovered – Currently Not Indexed]).

Lastly, by making your engineers work on code which they then throw away it wastes their enthusiasm for the project. Nobody wants to throw away something they spent a lot of time working on, least of all engineers that are motivated to do good work.

This is admittedly a bit of a tangent but it comes up a lot! The short answer is both can work but it’s typically easier to work with your site when organised into directories. Spending 3 days tagging pages is not fun, and as you add more you need the team to remember to do it. Conversely, putting a page about puppies in the /dogs/ folder is obvious and doesn’t require any additional work.

A pro-tip here is also that when pulling data from search console you can get more from their API if you have profiles setup for each directory on your website – this is not an option for flat sites.