[avg_dev]

That is really great context. I appreciate you taking the time to help me understand this all.

I'm going to bookmark your post so I have it now. This is all interesting and exciting to think about, and it makes me think of "Should I perhaps set up another VPS?" and "Should I look into becoming a website builder using some of these tools?" or maybe "Should I learn about the WP plugin ecosystem and consider becoming a plugin developer?" and many more. I do know from past experience though that going down any of these routes could turn into something that is quite time intensive and quite likely would not yield immediate results (and my time is, at the moment, mostly spoken for, and I have a full-time job). Still, it is definitely something I am thinking about, and I guess another thought that came about after reading your post was: "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a low-or-no-cost (low-cost most likely) way for non-tech-people to self-host things?" A sort of community anti-cloud VPS thing. Maybe run by some devops folks for very cheap, with the option of providing support and resiliency features at some cost. You just made me think: The idea of a small business or restaurant needing a low-touch website with the capability to self-update it is of course a very good one that makes total sense. And taking it a step further, wouldn't it be neat if stores could run their own online shopping sites without the need to pay someone like Shopify the large amount they do, and if restaurants could run their own delivery logistics without restoring to DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Skip the dishes? I guess I lean to the free open-source direction and envision a tech community that could keep wiki docs on how to self-host these things and the folks who ran them could update the docs as needed, and write code as needed, and so on. I don't know if what I'm saying is at all realistic; I just like a few things you have said, like Vanilla WP being one of the best things to happen to the web; I am guessing it just gives so many people the ability to have a nice website... I think it's a nice avenue of exploration and I am getting fed up with the centralization of all things web.