If you want dead-simple and dirt-cheap, NearlyFreeSpeech.net is still there. Put 25 cents in there, upload a file, done.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/Pastebin is another option for simple text.
For slightly more complex sites, check out Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Both will host your site for free with reasonable quotas.
As for:
> why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago?
It IS. Just put it on farcebook or tweeter or medium or blogwhatever. Even easier than geocities.
People don't want to spend eons discovering and reading your poorly formatted text file or janky HTML that doesn't work with phones and is vulnerable to drive-by ad injections and such. If you just have a simple message, those networks do a more effective job (for better or worse) of disseminating it. Readers flock to those networks because it makes content consumption easier.
It's like asking why you have to jump through major publishing houses to get your book on the front of the store display shelves, when anyone used to be able to write and bind a book. You still can, but the world at large doesn't want to spend effort sorting through your stuff and every other amateur's. It's not the ease of publication that matters to them, but the curation. The signal to noise ratio is too low otherwise (and is still very low even with curation).
From the hosting side, free web hosts became a victim of their own success, economonically infeasible, especially as bots and spiders took over the net. Most of the web is junk these days and there's not really much money in making it easier to publish more junk.
From the dev side, the CI and build tools are only necessary if you want to heavily use Javascript for interactivity or clientside loading. Plain ol' HTML and CSS work as they always have, with no building required. Just host it somewhere.