My feeling about GitHub Pages is that it is not unreasonable just to forget about the site. For any cheap shared hosting I would psychologically feel the need to monitor the site somehow, periodically check that the credit card works etc.

For me, there is a large relative (percentual) difference in the perceived cognitive load. Perhaps not a huge actual difference, but when you are running tens of projects, everything counts.

Now I am not talking about actual reality but the psychological effect. It might be that some shared hosting site is in fact more reliable than GitHub Pages.

Obviously, a blog that you just forget is not that useful, but last site I created using this method was an advertisement site for a book. I have several blogs where I write occasionally.

Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?

I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name in case later you want to run it somewhere else.

The article completely misses the point about the dating apps. It is not that the inferior product wins, but that if your product is so good that people only need one in their lifetime, you will quickly reach the limit on your sales. Planned obsolescence is a well-documented phenomenon in many fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Maybe your university is just using some commercial provider (such as Microsoft) that categorizes pages.