My website is ugly because I made it

Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.

For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?

It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.

I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?

I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only

Maybe apache or nginx as webservers

host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier

I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.

Within minutes you could start at https://neocities.org/

Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention.

Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.