The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's
servers.

Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of
managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None
of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.

So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.