IPFS uses QUIC as one of its supported transport protocols, and this works in the most common implementation, Kubo [1]. The spec for the QUIC transport used in IPFS [2] indicates the same certificate trust policy as for the TLS protocol [3]. The latter, in turn, relies on peer-to-peer authentication with automatically-generated self-signed certificates containing a libp2p-specific additional extension.
IPFS is particularly well suited to the use case of personal websites you've mentioned, as it's specifically designed to operate without any form of centralisation.
[1] https://github.com/ipfs/kubo.
IPFS runs on Golang. This implementation is not going to change anything.
I do actually agree that the privacy and anonymity aspects of IPFS are not well- conveyed. I think people get hooked on the "censorship-resistant" nature of decentralized systems, without understanding that even if you have multiple sources, for instance in a content-addressable network like IPFS, aggressive censorship systems have other strategies to dissuade dissemination or punish readers. You always have to be thinking a few steps ahead. Services like Tor and, I hope, the IPFS network both try to convey what threat models they are useful for, and which they are not, but it's really hard to stop overenthusiastic re-statements that give them super-powers they do not, in fact, possess.
That said, there's a bunch of careful thinking right now going on about how IPFS's privacy story could be improved: https://blog.ipfs.tech/ipfs-ping-2022-recap/ has a couple of sessions on this, and is a great summary of some other recent developments in the space.
One of those improvements is in the point about nodes being high CPU, RAM, etc. (I actually find this to be more of a challenge when running the full IPFS Go node locally on my desktop, rather than on a VPS; it requires some tweaking.)
The strategy right now is to encourage more implementations of IPFS to cover more use-cases; the original go-ipfs had to do everything, including maintaining some legacy decisions. Nowadays, there's a lot of effort on alternative IPFS implementations that can be slimmer, or optimised for particular scenarios, e.g. on an embedded device, serving a high-load web gateway, or providing millions of files. Protocol Labs recently renamed their canonical go-ipfs to kubo (https://github.com/ipfs/kubo ) to make it more of a peer with other implementations.
Of course, I love all these new generation implementations EQUALLY, but if you pushed me, I've enjoyed playing around with https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh , a modular rust implementation building off the increasingly robust rust libp2p etc libraries. There's some more to pick from here: https://docs.ipfs.tech/basics/ipfs-implementations/