Not only privacy, but also reliability in my experience. If you add in a CDN you now have a point of failure you have no control over that (Murphy's Law) fails at the most inopportune time. In all web frameworks it's pretty trivial to serve up static files with a future expiry date.
> a simple front end to which I can attach some new experiments for home brew coding
This thread is about engineers looking for a simple way to just create a UI. Pandering to niche neuroses about privacy by avoiding entirely mainstream technologies such as CDNs is out of scope!
You can think of it being a neuroses for yourself, but you don't have to label it as such for others.
It can be a perfectly reasonable concern in the life of others, while not in yours.
> This thread is about engineers looking for a simple way to just create a UI
The recommendation doesn't go against this. To create a UI, you'll have to host at least one HTML file. Potentially several, also images, stylesheets, javascripts, etc. One more to ditch the CDN doesn't add work to the process. Deploying one or two files isn't much of a difference.
Just one thing: do a favor for your visitor's privacy and don't use a CDN, download the css/js packages and host them yourself.
> An easy way to try out Mithril.js is to include it from a CDN and follow this tutorial. [1]
[1] https://mithril.js.org/