Personally I get my geek satisfaction from building systems that are rock-solid and require zero maintenance. Not choking on rare opportunities to go viral should they arise is a nice bonus too.

Per a comment I made to one of your other replies in this thread, VPS doesn’t exclude this. You can put it behind cloudflare for free.

And yes you can have preferences to keep things simple while others can make something unnecessarily complex. For personal projects this is fine and part of learning. If you had said “I much prefer… because…” it would have been fine but you said “objectively inferior in every meaningful way” which ignores people’s subjective preference for over engineering hobby stuff for learning.