>I would prefer to see widespread hosting become cheap and easy to use… as simple as signing up for an account
It is and has been for years. You can literally just sign up for a shared hosting account on hundreds, possibly thousands of services and put whatever you want online (within legal limits of course.) You can even still use SFTP if you want.
People just don't do it anymore, but it's never been less expensive or more accessible.
i think one of the biggest reason is discoverability… so a solution on this front would need to help solve that to a certain extent beyond just “heres the ftp, here you go”
One solution would be to maintain an account on a platform like Mastodon and link to your blog from there. For some reason this has its own acronym (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). This is what I do, along with using my blog as a backup for my Mastodon account (because it's a very small account and I have to delete content every couple of weeks) and using Mastodon for comments.
Unfortunately I don't think there's anything to be done about discovery on the mainstream web, everything was ruined by SEO before even SEO got ruined by AI. Not being discoverable there is probably better than not.