There's a spectrum OP / their LLM (hat tip the disclaimer, not shade) I think blurs into this false dichotomy.

Maybe the hardware is on my desk or in my closet, maybe its on a VPS or bare metal provider with standard IPMI, maybe its a proprietary cloud image with deep packet inspection rejecting connections from legitimate enterprise VPN subnet relays (cough Cloud SQL).

At some point you're dependent on a registrar and an ISP (or maybe you the thing like infinite LAN party, sick), and at some point the cops show up if you're too far out of bounds (in their view).

In 2025 my compromise is to prefer interchangeable bare metal providers and interchangeable S3-compatible providers and ship the same stack to there and to my desk. And park the domains with Njalla and Gandi. And have servers in complicated jurisdictions where fucking with them is a Great Power turf war.

It's not perfect, but its what an individual can do with nixpkgs and an attitude problem towards unaccountable authority.