Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.

Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.

Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.