This prompts a reflection about, as an industry, we should make a better job in providing solid foundations.
When I check tutorials on how to drill in the wall, there is (almost) no warning about how I could lose a finger doing so. It is expected that I know I should be careful around power tools.
How do we make some information part of the common sense? "Minimize the surface of exposure on the Internet" should be drilled in everyone, but we are clearly not there yet
As a society we already have the structures setup: The author had been more than welcome to attend a course or a study programme in server administration that would prepare them to run their own server.
I myself even wouldn't venture into exposing a server to the internet to maintain it in my freetime, and that is with a post graduate degree in an engineering field and more than 20 years of experience.
I find this to be extremely sad.
Unlike welding or diving, there is no inherent physical risk to life and limb to running a server. I should be able to stand up a server and leaving it running, unattended and unadministered, and then come back to it 20 years later to find it happily humming along unpwned. The fact that this isn't true isn't due to any sort of physical inevitability, it's just because we, the collective technologists, are shit at what we do.
The whole point of my comment is that it's only "ridiculous" because of path dependency and the choices that we have made. There's no inherent need for this to be true, and to think otherwise is just learned helplessness.
Sandstorm has been part of my selfhosted stack since it was a start-up, and it has worked for a decade with virtually zero attention, and no exploits I am aware of.
If there are other hosted apps that want a really easy on-ramp for new users: packaging for sandstorm is an easy way to create one.