Beauty of cloud :) This could be easily served by a $100/month DO droplet with 0 worries about $.
Are there any providers with free egress?
I used Hetzner many years ago but completely forgot about them.
You probably care because you don't like waste. But another person might not care so much about waste, and cares more about other things. Like the time it takes to get something done, or the technical ability required, or the ability to find someone else to maintain something, or its flexibility in being changed. Or maybe just the fun of building something with cool toys.
You originally commented with cost being the factor. But if the person building this doesn't mind an additional cost, then they don't need to build it on DO or Hetzner. That said, if they do built it on the cloud, they do need to keep in mind the cost... just like if they built it on DO or Hetzner, they would need to keep in mind how to rebuild the instance when it goes down, how to maintain the instance's OS for security patches, etc.
Both require additional considerations besides the one thing. Your choices just move around the necessary complexity.
My own machines, of course.
I'd rather pay pennies for bandwidth than rely on "unmetered" bandwidth which tends to suddenly stop being unmetered if you use it too much.
What I'm aware of are services which do not charge extra for egress but severely limit your egress bandwidth (like 10 Gbit peak, 100 Mbit avg)
And limiting egress bandwidth is better is better done in the service per client than by the hoster for your system
Check this out. You _almost_ use the most expensive service.
I think you should expand your awareness. Hetzner for instance doesn't mention anywhere that they throttle your 10gbit uplink, but they limit to 20TB/month, with ~1EUR for every TB over. Seems like you wouldn't even have noticed what you described in your article.
Sure there are cheaper options then GCS but, there is no one providing unlimited free bandwidth