You can put the whole thing on CloudFlare Pages for free too. Zero reason to pay for or deal with the complexity of an unnecessary VPS.

Again “zero reason”. For some people it’s fun to have a VPS, that is a reason in and of itself.

Of course literally anything can be 'reasonable' if you a priori like doing it independent of its technical/functional merits. My ex-coworker liked to write literally tens of thousands of lines of extra, completely unnecessary code for fun. That was a fine reason for him personally but didn't make it any less stupid to deal with for the rest of us.

The key here is “coworker”. He has an obligation to do reasonable things due to being employed by someone and it affecting others.

This is completely different. When it’s a person blog and a personal VPS it’s affecting nobody but that person.

And that's A-OK for them if that person likes more work with more headaches for a solution that costs more and performs worse. (Although less OK for everyone else when their VPS gets compromised and made part of a botnet or otherwise used for cybercrime.)