You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/
You can use whatever Database or NPM modules you want.
One suggestion: Make a cloud storage product option free up to a few megabytes for hosting small personal sites. Maybe it exists already but I haven't found it.
There are a ton of options on what you can achieve inside the free tier. But the simplest one for the use case you seem to require is to author a static html site in a good WYSIWYG html editor and then deploying it as a static site in GAE.
Edit: My use case is to move a couple of static sites to a host that supports a secure HTTPS connection by default, which App Engine seems to do: <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/console/using.... I'll try moving one of my sites over and set up SSL with with a certificate from <https://letsencrypt.org/>.
I'm currently trying to get my feet wet on GAE. Judging from your statement, are you suggesting that people should look into Managed VMs and maybe skip the regular GAE (or known as the original GAE)?
Perhaps the original GAE will be deprecated in the future?
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not App Engine but I'm familiar enough with their thinking.
I'm also very excited to see GCP people responding to any GCP questions and/or clarifying its past "reputation" with a calm manner ;). Clearly the tide has changed (probably comes from the top too? :)).
Me and my partner are planning to invest a significant amount of time to the GCP ecosystems!