I agree on many of these points. But, if you can have ways to monetize without putting any ads on your site, that's even better. I may never have to put ads on mine. With Patreon & Discord subs, along with streamelements and other stuff on my stream, those can go towards community expenses including my website.
We also are starting a company with a friend of mine, and if our company does well, I'll essentially have free web hosting for my site and forum, and offloading most of the attachments to CloudFlare R2 is pretty cheap. IIRC, 100 gb of storage is like 1.5/mo or something. So it won't be that bad.