It makes end to end responsibility more cumbersome. There were days people just stored MS Frontpage output on their home server.

Many folks switched to Lets Encrypt ages ago. Certificates are way easier to acquire now than they were in "Frontpage' days. I remember paying 100's of dollars and sending a fax for "verification."

I agree, but I think the pendulum just went too far on the tradeoff scale.

Do they offer any long term commitment for the API though. I remembered that they were blocking old cert manager clients that were hammering their server. You can't automate that (as it could be unsafe, like Solarwinds) and they didn't give one year window to do it manually either.

You do have a point. I still feel that upgrading your client is less work than manual cert renewals.

I've done the work to set up, by hand, a self-hosted Linux server that uses an auto-renewing Let's Encrypt cert and it was totally fine. Just read some documentation.