Self-hosting is a hobby, more or less. You do it to get something practical out of it, but you also do it because you learn something on the way.

Self-hosting is a low risk way of learning lessons which otherwise would be high risk.

The effort self hosting takes sinks with the experience you gain.

There is terrible software to self-host (both as a beginner and as an expert) and there is software that is a breeze to work with.

There is battles to be chosen and battles to be avoided.

I host 20 websites and multiple services and it costs me less than a day of work per month (realistically maybe 4 hours or less a month)