Git hub pages is a pretty nice service. Compare this to https://replit.com/ which pushes their deployment and you realize that for static website which can do a lot of things these days VS Code with great GitHub integration is just easier and better.

And it is easier/cheaper than Vercel too :)

Once you want some serverside/db things there are number of paths... Supabase, edge functions, DigitalOcean, AWS, Zapier hooks