At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdown to HTML and generates index pages and RSS and embed metadata and such. It's been completely fine with the surge of traffic from Hacker News; barely broke a sweat. CDNs only make sense imo if you're consistently having Hacker News levels of traffic.
You can also try one of the many providers that will host your static site for you for free, like GitHub Pages.
True, but the point of the article was to avoid centralized providers as you may inadvertently be shadowbanned. I have much more faith/trust in Github than Medium, but nonetheless it still suffers algorithmic approaches to content.
GitHub is a merely a host, not a platform. You can switch off the former in an instant, but the latter locks you in.