One more advantage to having Wordpress do the hosting/server maintenance/updates is that they are immeasurably better at locking down blogs to quickly protect unpatched flaws andfailures to auto-update that otherwise require constant hands-on attention to the site and plugins (or expecting/paying a sitehost to do it). These days automated hacking tools randomly test sites for known vulnerabilities and inject malware and it’s a requirement to update plugins and middleware or else you will get hacked. One person I know with a tiny religious site was near tears because not only was her site compromised, serving malware to visitors, but then it got recognized at Google, and Chrome automatically blocked visitors from visiting her site (plastering a scary warning when they tried); she found out 2nd-hand and her webhost was less than helpful in eliminating the malware and patching the system.
Wordpress.com doesn’t allow any and all themes, but there’s a good enough variety of free-to-affordable ones to choose. And it doesn’t allow most plugins, but the ones you get are safe.
A few years back, Ghost appeared as a cross between Medium and Wordpress, designed specifically for writing, for ease of writing, and for beautiful, simple sites. But it remains less sophisticated than Wordpress.com, Wordpress has made gains in simplification and usability, and Ghost’s own hosted solution is pretty expensive, starting at $29/month.