indeed!
and when a lot of people are talking about 'self-hosting' they're mostly talking about a VPS they rent from some provider who could vanish just as easily as Proton can. I'd like to see the numbers on how many self-hosting evangelists (I don't mean that term pejoratively. I think self-hosting is great) are actually talking about metal they physically control.
Generally, that is why you'd build in redundancy and backups so that if your VPS provider, or cloud provider stopped working you could bring the service back up very quickly, however self-hosted email has proved reliable overall and there are even Helm charts for Kubernetes.
I can't tell where you want to draw the line. I personally have a couple physical servers in a cage. I do not own the data center in which they reside. Does that count?
If I don't "self-host", then neither does the corp I work for, with hundreds of machines in other people's DCs...
My original (sort of absurdist) point was exactly that; saying "here's the line between 'smart people' and 'non-smart people'" is both pointless and rude.
Everyone has different threat models and resources.
As someone with more than one weird hobby, I'm pretty sure conflating 'smart' with 'committed to weird hobbies' is a sin weird hobbyists of every stripe commit.
Hosting locations matter when you are buying network-delivered services. Even if it is trivial to bypass for the user, this one time, jurisdictional risk to the provider is something that you have to consider as a factor when comparing competitors and self-host options.