You can buy a desk phone and connect a voip line if you really wanted. Otherwise I recommend against it because you’ll learn quickly enough how bad the robocallers/spammers situation is
I've got a dozen or so phone numbers, spread across VOIP assigned, GVoice, mobile SIM, and traditional landline exchange (transferred to VOIP). The only one that gets a significant amount of spam is a traditionally LL number. Based on the content of that spam and what they know (I'll often screw with them), I believe the spam is mostly based off targeted victim lists. I can't say how much GVoice is silently blocking similarly targeted spam. But the point is if you don't give out your number to lots of businesses such that it's not sold to the surveillance industry, it's not likely to get much spam.
I wish the author had expounded on their setup. I too pay ~$1/mo for VOIP DIDs, but from what I've seen of consumer-facing prices I realize that's a facet of getting nitty and gritty with SIP (which doesn't necessarily mean self-hosting, eg voip.ms).
What is what this article is about, the author enjoyed having a VOIP-based house phone. Everyone just assumed it was about POTS because they don't read past the headlines.
I wish the author had expounded on their setup. I too pay ~$1/mo for VOIP DIDs, but from what I've seen of consumer-facing prices I realize that's a facet of getting nitty and gritty with SIP (which doesn't necessarily mean self-hosting, eg voip.ms).