Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.
The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.
Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.