WordPress all the way. I genuinely think it's the self-hosted solution that offers the best combination of control, flexibility and ease-of-use. You just need a couple of plugins for performance and safety and you are set [0].

There are literally tens of thousands of themes - open source and commercial - that you can try out in a matter of minutes instead of wasting days or weeks designing your own theme.

You rarely have to code stuff by yourself because there is a plugin for any functionality you can imagine.

Latest version of WordPress comes with the new Gutenberg editor which I'm personally not a huge fan of as it obfuscates too much of WordPress' inner workings. You might, therefore, want to use the Classic Editor plugin as a solution.

If you haven't already bought a domain name, I recommend Porkbun. Moved several domains to them in the past months and have found them to be cheap and yet reliable straight shooters.

[0] My list of must-have plugins: Yoast (for SEO), Autoptimize (caching/performance), Wordfence Security (multi-layer security).