Those adverse to paying new fees for their wordpress.com blogs, may consider upgrading to the Pro Plan or using another CMS, such as blogger.com. In addition to my wordpress.com sites, I run a few niche sites on blogger.com. Those sites are easy to maintain and of this date remain free. You can get a TLD (top level domain) at a decent price through “Google Domains.” Like many items these days, “freebies” are on the way out.