Ah, so uBOL does have the ability to adjust the blocking level on a per-site basis, which is what I assumed "per-site switches" meant. I see now that the original uBO has/had a more granular level of configuration available. (Which I suspect most folks never used, but still... my bad there.)
The biggest are that not all filtering capabilities are supported in MV3 and that the filter lists are only updated when the extension itself is updated. More details in the uBOL FAQ:
As someone who works with WordPress every day, I can see both sides of the issue here.
Could it be easier to set up and run locally? Sure. Could it be easier to customize without knowing any code? Sure. But also, getting a dynamic CMS like WordPress to produce static output for use on GitHub Pages is a sort of "square peg, round hole" situation, and it's not surprising that the author ran into some issues.
For running WordPress locally without mucking around with PHP, MySQL, and such, what you probably want is Local [1], which installs everything you need all in one go, and is quite user-friendly. You can spin up local sites in minutes, install whatever plugins you want, and go to town. (If you host with the company that makes Local, you can even deploy to live from inside the app.)
I haven't used any of the plugins designed to make static pages from WordPress, but my gut read is that they probably aren't going to work quite right unless you A) really know what you're doing with WP, and B) you understand the limitations of your chosen static code generation tool. After all, WordPress is meant to be run in a dynamic environment with PHP, MySQL, and a web server. Shoehorning it into some other way of working might not end well, especially if you are new to WordPress.
Anyway, it looks like the author wound up on SiteGround, which as basic shared hosts go is one of the better ones. :) It'll certainly be easier than running WP locally, generating static files, and deploying those to GitHub Pages.
Not the GP, but I'm guessing they prefer static sites simply because they are much more difficult to hack or compromise in some way. There's no database to defend from injection attacks, etc.