Colbert
The person who built this is doing it wrong. Not their core strategy or making lots of pages, but hitting keywords that basically get no search volume, and then positioning it to the client as "page 1 rankings in two days."
The concept is that you can put a page in a city, that represents a keyword. Each city has for that keyword has it's own with virtually identical content. Assuming your content and web page isn't overtly spammy, Google doesn't penalize this type of strategy.
My opinion as to why they don't penalize it is that regardless of the city, the user is getting what they expected from the web page. The user searches PC repair, they get a page related to PC repair, they call and get a PC repair company on the line -> They got what they wanted and everyone is happy.
In this case, the noob that executed this strategy should be condensing the pages. "Best" "affordable" "best price" "guru" "pro" can all be condensed to one single page: PC Repair Buffalo. The way this is built currently, with dupe content and such precise keywords with basically no search volume, I would be concerned those pages would cannibalize each other.
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Travis
The theory is that one is presenting content to exactly match a search phrase. I have done similar way back in the day and it did help to capture long tail searches for non competitive terms.
In this instance, they are barely doing any on page SEO – just changing H1. And given how many actual searches there are for "Buffalo area pc repair guru" it might actually give you a rank. I doubt more than 5 people a year would see it. Or it might well get overshadowed by any Buffalo repair search since it's a big city with competition. Now think of some tiny town without a pc shop…that might actually work but there may well be zero searches so who cares?
There are better ways to optimize ranking signals. But 10+ years ago sometimes this would get you decent wins.

Colbert
Side note… I actually talked to the person who did this on the phone once. He pitched a client of mine, offering 2 day page 1 rankings, etc. The guy is an older dude. He actually coined some widely used phrase (I forgot what phrase it was), and he'll tell you all about it if you call him up.
Basically he just calls up local businesses, sells them on page 1 rankings in two days for like $500 per month or something, does a page build like this one via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) using a group of Indians, and that's it. Not a bad hustle.
I know it's him because I found his link in the footer of this client's website. He's a nice guy but his strategy doesn't really drive any tangible results as executed (except for the promised page 1 rankings for a bunch of keywords that don't get any search volume). If he updated it to align with modern best practices, it would probably work out a lot better.

Andrew 🎓
Why not just mass create, spin certain paragraphs and headings with custom spin directives, and then interlink pages based on proximity? Send all the links to the hub (/locations) afterwords.
I guess you could also redirect some of these smaller city pages over time to the larger city in the proximity after you let the page age a bit. Certainly not a 2 day thing but plenty of softwares exist that do this.
Side note.
I hate when people keep .php in their URLs.
Illia
For which reason does someone build .php pages now? When I see that in URL I clearly understand that website totally sucks

Jake
The glaring red flag from the extremely limited information (sitemap) is camel-case URLs. As a technical SEO, this makes me cringe and I would immediately dismiss this candidate. Fundamentals.
Now the assumption beyond that here is shallow, spun content used for local landing pages. Not ideal — however I have seen this work in the right circumstances — i.e. multiple physical locations. If this is merely service area "geo-fencing", there are more refined ways of implementing, in part with Google My Business (GMB) optimization.
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