This is the disconnect between the modern commercial web and the real web. Personal sites aren't usually about gettting views, making money, or grabbing attention. Those are profit motives.
Personal sites are about putting something out there you care about. It doesn't matter who, if anyone at all, sees it. It doesn't matter if your site only has 90% uptime. Or if it looks weird and only works in some browsers. The only thing that matters is if you like it.
Another big difference is the freshness of the content. The "modern web" will bury anything that is not new or trendy and make it virtually disappear for everyone that isn't looking for it specifically.
On the "old web", content freshness is what the creator wants it to be. Old articles can still be as relevant five years down the line, given that the author updates it as needed. Cool and weird stuff can still be cool and weird after the fact, doesn't depend on word-of-mouth or algorithms to "live", doesn't have to be "released" on a schedule, and doesn't have to compete against other creators. It just exists for people to stumble upon eventually: the when doesn't matter.
For the most part, yes. The personal site lets you experiment in the way you want to.
But most people will still need some kind of validation to make it feel like they're not just putting information out into a silent, gaping void. You don't have to stoop to Twitter style hot takes to do this, but some acknowledgement from the outside world is still desirable.
Back in the day, there were "guestbooks" you could sign and webrings you could join, linking to other related sites. Blog software had user comments and blogrolls built in from Day 1. Unfortunately spambots and useless pingback notifications killed the discussion sections.
Webmentions are pretty cool as is covered in the article under discussion. I recently implemented a static webmentions receiver for my static site and got a pingback implementation as a side effect (http://superkuh.com/blog/2020-01-10-1.html).
Pingback is old and well known so it gets a lot of spam. But webmention is still new enough it's still useful. Sure, it'll eventually get spammed out to but this is the lifecycle of web-objects. Gotta get use of out them while they're young and not terrible yet.
Many people create content to achieve some other goal, like activism, education, or building a business, which usually benefits from many other people seeing the content.
This is the disconnect between the modern commercial web and the real web. Personal sites aren't usually about gettting views, making money, or grabbing attention. Those are profit motives.
Personal sites are about putting something out there you care about. It doesn't matter who, if anyone at all, sees it. It doesn't matter if your site only has 90% uptime. Or if it looks weird and only works in some browsers. The only thing that matters is if you like it.