But what about discoverability? Is there any good search engine for code? These days I often find more interesting projects when searching code on GH rather than by name or description on repos.
I'm all for the idea of self-hosting in abstract, but in practice I don't want to spend my life looking after services.
I'm all for the idea of growing your own rice, but in practice I'd rather pay someone else to do it for me.
I'm not trolling, I'm just emphasizing a super super important aspect which HNers tend to minimize, which is that self-hosting is work and even people who are technically able to do it might not want to.
Otherwise, yes, non-essential things are best delegated, especially when it's free. Some essential things also have to be delegated, if doing them yourself takes too much (like growing rice). The latter works best when the essential thing is a commodity with a wide choice of suppliers (like rice).
In practice, if you do not require 99.99% uptime SLAs, all you do is connect every 6 months to do a docker pull and update the image.