What is your recommendation to move away from WordPress (if any)?
If you want to spend time fiddling with a CMS, there are heaps of choices and heaps of arguments about why those choices are better than Wordpress or each other. (I'm a fan of static site generators publishing to AWS S3 with CloudFront, but I NEVER recommend that to clients or friends, I always tell them 'Just use specialist hosted WordPress, or maybe SquareSpace if you want something more "website-y" and less "blog-y".
But don't use a $5/month GoDaddy web hosting add-on/upgrade they'll try to sell you when they sell you a domain. Use a WordPress specialist (wordpress.com and WPEngine are both great choices, there'll be others too, but those are the two I've used and am happy to recommend).
Self hosting is possible, and can save you money, but only if you value your time at zero dollars. Sure you can run a WP install on a $5/month Digital Ocean droplet, but you don't have the economy of scale that companies like WPEngine can offer you for things like security monitoring and updates, automated backups and management, on click restores from backup, all that nice additional WordPress support they can provide.
If you want to write a blog though, that's all wasted time which would almost certainly be better spend writing blog posts than "getting your static site generator set up just how you like it".
Hosted Wordpress is fine. You don't need to use any features you don't want. Take regular backups, turn auto updates on, and leave the hosting to a WP hosting specialist (wordpress.com is a fine choice.) Make sure you own the domain you're using, you don't want to have your blog at stereoradonc.wordpress.com, go register stereoradonc.com (or since that't probably in use or squatted, pick something else, but make sure you own the domain, no Automattic or Medium or whoever).
My reason for self doubt crept in, because I was on their business plan that was up for renewal. I realised it would be super expensive to renew. Last time, I was lucky to have a discount coupon code work for me with 50% off.
I couldn't muck around with the plugins (much), and then I realised the current Gutenberg has evolved to my liking (embedding).
I own the domain, and it made sense to have a unique one. I'll stick with them to ensure a peace of mind. (Their Live Chat for higher plans is fantastic!) They have their niggles, but work well.
If a static site generator is beyond you, stick with WordPress and focus on creating good content.
I got tired of managing a WordPress MU installation (although, I still have one un-migrated site), and moved to Jekyll. I wrote about the migration at https://dev.clintonblackburn.com/2019/03/31/wordpress-to-jek....
Let me know if you have any feedback, I am still working on the right pricing and blog overall design.