A huge advantage of GH / CF is that your site has a strong chance of outliving you, if that's something you care about.

If you're self hosting, either at home or on a VPS, you have to worry about domains expiring and credit cards being cancelled, which is inevitably going to happen if you don't have a succession plan in place. You could probably solve it with a bunch of lawyering, but that's expensive.

Free services don't have this problem. They can still go away, it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a "might" versus a "definitely will"