Mourning the days of blogging past

Trying to figure out blogging outside of the WordPress ecosystem (where I’ve been for ~17 years) is so frustrating. (WordPress as a CMS is so bulky and unwieldy, and their “website builder” direction the last 5 years or so is extremely un-user friendly.)
I know I’m entering my grumpy old man phase, but my WordPress-powered blog in 2007 was super-customizable BY ME.

With no real tech knowledge, I installed it on a server in 5 minutes.

Writing and publishing on it was intuitive.

I could Google, “How do I ____?” and there were answers on the first page of search results.

Now, it seems my options are:

Use our locked down ecosystem and if you want to change literally anything, it’s $30 a month.

Or

Learn python and markdown, create a virtual server, and open a command line before you write a word.
Designing websites and writing on websites are different skills, different interests, and different hobbies.
I’m *this* damn close to seeing if my Blogger account is still active.