Not sure who your comment is targeted to, but I've been working with a friend's mom - 55ish - on her WordPress website. With no tech experience she was able to spin up a site with a custom domain and get very close to launching but got bogged down in some WooCommerce details. She was also using Elementor which seemed to not play nice with WordPress.com's hosting. I suspect this is why Elementor now has their own hosting.

My point: this highly motivated but completely inexperienced woman was able to build a website on her own and get very close to launching.

I have no experience with AWS Lightsail. I'm sure it's a fine platform, but to me WordPress.com is really making the web accessible to a lot of people that otherwise wouldn't have access. Maybe it's not worth it to many with a tech background, but for her, WordPress.com is making her dreams come true.

One may complain about the prices for specific SaaS offerings, but mentioning Lightsail as a alterantive to a completely managed offer is not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

I got burned by Lightsail: did you know that if your instance exceeds its CPU "burst" quote for too long they disable the instance, without offering a clear way to get it working again?

Some notes on how I recovered from that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/aws/recovering-lightsail-data

Maybe they've fixed that issue now? This happened to me in 2021.