Am I wrong for thinking that this established expectation (especially for smaller bootstrapped instances) is perfectly cromulent from an ops perspective? Honestly asking because I come from a time before DevOps and Microservices were a thing, and we all hosted our crud on servers we had physical access to (though VPSes are great!)
Yes, I totally get the benefits of having a CDN. Especially with global access, but nobody's setting up a globally distributed CDN for their dinky Mastodon instance.