I'm glad you wrote this reply because you saved me a lot of time making many of the exact same points.

I appreciate Evan's point and I agree: If you're looking to get up and running quickly putting content out into the world, you can do that on platforms that do the 'heavy lifting' for you and get away with not bothering with your own site.

However, I think there is still absolutely merit to having your own site for the reasons you list. Also, there are a lot of other options these days for self-hosted content management systems and blogging platforms besides WordPress (like Ghost, Hugo, etc.)

I personally dislike WordPress as well (and really dislike PHP). I ended up rolling my custom publishing engine which took a very long time, but now I have a platform that I can easily customize and adapt to do whatever I need, because I wrote the code and understand exactly how it works.

Would I recommend this to everyone? Probably not - I'm definitely one of the types that Evan jokes about: Using building sites as a procrastination strategy :p

But... I like having a central repository for all my content that I have complete control over. I can post to my own site, and then push out to multiple other platforms (like Medium). If a platform goes out of business, or decides to block my account, or starts doing things I don't like (like jamming their own ads into my content), I can simply retreat back to my own site and still maintain ownership and control over my content and data.

Having your own site also insulates you from 'vendor lock in'. In theory, even if my hosting provider decided to ban or block me, I could be back up and running with all my content on a different host within a day or 2, because my site uses common, open-source technologies that are not proprietary.

If a newsletter provider or platform (like Substack or Medium) decides to ban you, that's curtains for you. They can freeze your account, and lock you out of your own Email lists and data. They might be 'nice' and let you download these before you leave... but depending on the terms of service, they might not be obligated to. You're at their mercy.

Even if you don't get banned, you might want to leave on your own accord (i.e. the platform changes ownership and gains an unsavory reputation for hosting questionable content you would rather not be affiliated with). It can be a lot more difficult switching platforms, because many intentionally 'lock you in' by making it very difficult to switch to another.