Well, given that I am using Docker it doesn't really matter much... but the bigger issue is: GCP in the past has completely blocked access from accounts when they detect random things.

Unless I meet their demands, my entire infra is gone/down for days, which I can't deal with.

You write this as if it's unrealistic. Who spends half an hour or more every month managing each tiny server? The closest server to me right now has probably taken about that long in the past year, swapping out a failed drive that unfortunately wasn't in a hot-swap bay. And it's much more powerful than a $35/month cloud instance.

A half-hour a month seems like a lot of maintenance for a server.