You do realize that the managed website hosting of the late 90s/early 00s still exists today, right?
You don't have to stand up your own servers in your favorite cloud provider and become a Cloud DevOps expert. You don't have to manage deployments, dependencies, etc. You can still pay $3/month to get shared hosting on DreamHost, upload your HTML file, and it gets served. No fiddling with nginx, no operating system patching, etc.
Even if you don't want to pay $3/month, I'm sure there are still hosts that will give you a few megabytes of storage and a couple gigabytes of traffic for free.
Hmm I'm not sure most people mean html files when they say 'web server' - I used to run a mail server, a couple websites, a blog, a couple wikis, with auth integration, and a couple custom web apps with live two-way messaging capabilities and associated backends...
You don't need much fancy for a plain page, no, but that's also not really what I'm talking about. I still sometimes use local services on my lan, with web interfaces, which are NOT routers, dishwashers, etc. - think file or media management.
You don't have to stand up your own servers in your favorite cloud provider and become a Cloud DevOps expert. You don't have to manage deployments, dependencies, etc. You can still pay $3/month to get shared hosting on DreamHost, upload your HTML file, and it gets served. No fiddling with nginx, no operating system patching, etc.
Even if you don't want to pay $3/month, I'm sure there are still hosts that will give you a few megabytes of storage and a couple gigabytes of traffic for free.