GitHub Pages vs GitLab Pages vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages (new) vs Neocities vs... ?
I'd default to gitlab pages personally, but that's just because I'm familiar with Git
all of these have git hooks/integrations tbh, but I totally understand
You could always self-host if your ISP allows you to open ports 80+443. It's a privacy trade-off, of course. I do this with a rule on my webserver to fail direct HTTP connections to my IP address, but serve requests to the domain name.
Self-hosting works best if you're trying to access your own stuff, I guess. If you're trying to broadly share things, gitlab pages IMO.
GitLab > Github just because of free private repos and not Microsoft. I think netlify still needs to back end to a hosted git repo so there's no reason to use them unless you like bitbucket or whatever.
Don't know shit about Cloudfare or Neocities.
Also NetlifyCMS is dope as shit if you want non programmers to write to your static site.
neocities is good. kind of limited because they're actually free (that is, not for the price of your data)
I use Netlify + Cloudflare CDN to cache everything to get around Netlify's free tier bandwidth limitations cause my site apparently uses 1.5 TB of bandwidth per month. I like Netlify cause it works with private repose, you can preview changes before deploying to prod and it also has lambda functions in case you need them for something (link shortening in my case).
You could probably just start off with github/gitlab/bitbucket though (I believe these can also be set up to use Cloudflare if you run into bandwidth limitations) and easily switch to Netlify if needed.