[kactus]

I'm in the same boat. I ran and maintained my own VPS for a decade to host several WordPress sites. I'm not a sysadmin, and package updates can be a nightmare if you only deal with it once every few months.

Ultimately I gave up and moved to SSGs + CloudFlare Pages, and put the WordPress sites I couldn't convert on managed hosting. My life has been so much easier.

This all will change in the future - I do think the free SSG hosting is a temporary loss leader for these companies. Hosting on a VPS would yield faster builds and serving static files isn't hard. And I'm sure there will be even easier ways to host WordPress sites.