You don't control a VPS, uptime doesn't matter, and even my 5 Mb/s upload is just fine. Electrical costs are marginal. But most importantly there is nothing more convient than $ cp photo.jpg ~/www/ and sending someone the link example.com/photo.jpg. Plus you have tons of space.
That's not to say that a VPS in addition isn't useful or fun. https://indieweb.org/POSSE and all. It just isn't at all required.
It’s strange to compare self hosting and GitHub pages.
In most case the main factors to choose self hosting are independence, fun and learning by tinkering. That’s three items that GitHub Pages doesn’t provide.
Just recently I linked my home LAN with my VPS with WireGuard. I needed to configure queues on my home router because I got consistent 100MBps on the wire and this is a bit too much for my VPS provider (too much to pay, not to handle).
That's not to say that a VPS in addition isn't useful or fun. https://indieweb.org/POSSE and all. It just isn't at all required.