These days it feels like people have simply forgotten that you could also just have a bare repository on a VPS and use it over ssh.

Most developers don’t even know git and GitHub are different things…

I've found that a bare repo over SSH is the simplest way to keep control and reduce attack surface, especially when you don't need fancy PR workflows. I ran many projects with git init --bare on a Debian VPS, controlled access with authorized_keys and git-shell, and wrote a post-receive hook that runs docker-compose pull and systemctl restart so pushes actually deploy. The tradeoff is you lose built-in PRs, issue tracking, and easy third party CI, so either add gitolite or Gitea for access and a simple web UI, or accept writing hooks, backups, receive.denyNonFastForwards, and scheduled git gc to avoid surprises at 2AM.