I'd recommend, unfortunately, buying a cheap $200 netbook and running cloudflare tunnel on it. As long as you're relying on other people's computers for hosting you'll keep looking forever
My vote for doing this is to get a second hand Lenovo/HP/Dell mini pc.
They're cheap (thanks to corporate upgrade cycles and the sheer number of "obsolete" models that are out there on eBay et al.), quiet, reliable, low power consumption, and generally pretty capable for the money.
The Cloudflare dependency is for networking, not hosting. It would be very impressive to see a self-hosted service available over the internet without introducing a 3rd-party dependency or two.
Yes, but my point is that there are many web hosting services, but only very few such proxy services to my knowledge. (Tailscale is another great option if you don't need public reachability.)
I don't think it's a great tradeoff, when optimizing for independence of specialized solutions at least.
