gitweb requires server setup, while Mercurial web ui can quickly start locally without any configuration and that was the one of mercurial selling point until github and other services arrives.
I think the way you're using hg's web UI is slightly different to the uses I think of for sites like GitHub, BitBucket or SourceHut.
A web UI is fine for being able to see the different commits, and files at different points in time.
But people also make use of GitHub as a hosted repository for sharing code with others, as an issue tracker, and for doing code review etc. -- for sharing things outside a local network, there's the understanding that either you're paying someone else to host it, or you're making effort to host it yourself, so "requires setup" isn't much of an issue.
"sourcehut competes with bitbucket" puts more emphasis on the latter than the former.
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb
But in both cases, the user has to have a server to put it on, making services like Sourcehut and Bitbucket (may it rest in peace) useful.