I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly n

I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve. Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium. Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.