Most of those Aliexpress vendors ship with no RAM and no OS as a significantly cheaper option anyway, so many of the people who are buying that hardware are just grabbing their own OS in the first place, I’d think. It’s certainly what I’d do if I were in the market for one of those 150 dollar firewall boxes.

I think you should look at some static site generators, probably, since that leaves you with an end product that can be hosted with any webserver quite easily. Hugo is the one that I use, and it has a lot of nice themes for personal blogs and such. Most of the themes I’ve looked at generate the pages from Markdown.