Giving up on Google Cloud
Captain's Log: Stardate 77998.1
Just a quick update today: https://anukari.com has been updated to the new website layout. I do still plan to hire a designer to make it really good, but this is a zillion times more useful than the placeholder I had before.
I gave up on Google Cloud. It's just gotten so ridiculously complex that it's horrible for running simple apps. Even their "cloud run" feature which should make it easy doesn't. Mapping a custom domain for a cloud run service is a serious undertaking, and their ways of simplifying it crashed with weird internal errors. It's great that Google's platform is available for other huge clients who need massive scaling, but they have completely dropped the ball for simple apps.
Fortunately I found railway.app, which is the polar opposite. It took like 5 minutes to have the app serving and the custom domain cut over. It's the most stupidly easy hosting for a Python app that I've seen, and pushing a new release takes only about a minute. It's great so far, though obviously less configurable/powerful than Google Cloud.
One last note: my idea to use the python library NiceGUI for the site was a horrible idea that will never work. So I'm looking into what I'll replace it with. Right now I'm thinking ReactPy might be cool.