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There are a lot of legitimate reasons to have a public github/gitlab/whatever account that is not self hosted.

Care to list some?

One of the biggest for me would be sharing the repo/working together without exposing my server/NAS to the public.

There exist free plans of cloud-hosted Git repos for small teams.

If you need to share, you can simply rent a $3 host from Hetzner and handle it extremely privately.