Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.
That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.
Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.
Why do they have to make it so so easy…
Well search and maps (and some others) have no paid tier. Even for paid products, google does quite explicitly make money from the free version through ads. And most google ads are through third party sites, so you can’t opt out of them by paying google.