Plenty of hosted and self-hostable blog engines out there. You don’t have to be a web developer for that. (Sorry if I missed some sarcasm…)
No need. The easiest ways are bearblog, ghost, wordpress.com, substack etc. They are all as easy to use as HN!
Try using Hugo, makes it very easy
I have a hugo site on gitlab. I don't even bother with the tooling anymore. I use the web ide to add a new post and cloudflare builds and publishes it when I commit. All for free.