some people (myself included) like hosting their own stack for fun or for learning.

There's additional concern with tying your work to something like github it makes it more of a pain to pull it off and put it somewhere else.

I'm not really sure what you mean by objectively inferior. It's trade offs like everything in this field.

As far as harder, I don't really think the lift for a personal VPS is that high. Again it's a fun hobby project for most. It's fun to run your own stack.

If you want to opt into the github cloudflare goodness that's fine they're good services but I wouldn't say it's better or degnegrate others for not doing that.