It’s possible to achieve this with WordPress Multisite feature. I did this before – with “subfolder” settings, you can create two websites (with one WP instance), example.com/en/ and example.com/de/ …
But I did it only once when I didn’t know better. And it was pain in the … to maintain. Then I found Polylang plugin, and I never looked back. I use it on some websites for many years with no issues, it just works.