your WP concerns sound similar to mine. I ran a WP site for years locked it down server ran fine but upgrades and maintenance required setting up a local dev environment etc not always possible when I don't always have a personal machine to work on. I found the perfect solution in something like WPEngine you literally just worry about the wp-content folder and thats it - but it comes at a cost and a cost I'm not willing to pay for a personal site that is updated once every few months and visited even less!

I ended up moving from wordpress to static (eleventy) on netlify and now I'm looking to go back to wordpress! I tried the blogging from markdown files on my phone/tablet but I miss a good old (non gutenberg) CMS! (plus shortcodes are super handy and theres plugins and code for everything!)