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"
How many free hosts from 20 years are still alive? Not many.
20 years ago was 2006. The iPhone wasn’t out yet and the internet was far from how big it is today. These days GH and CF are giants that are synonymous for code storage and the domain resolution respectively. So it’s rather unlikely that these household names of the internet will go down the drain in the next decade.
!RemindMe 10 years
Shoutout 250m.com, you’re not forgotten