I've used Blogger on a semi-regular basis, say, once a month for countless years. It still receives occasional updates every now and then, last time last year if I remember correctly. So there's certainly maintenance crew assigned to it, even some new features have been added. I do agree that it's a pretty niche product in their lineup these days.
Personally I hope it goes away. I would like to see Google focus on enabling bloggers and site creators to host their own sites and work to build and automate open source projects into their cloud products. There are so many static site frameworks for bloggers at this point that it would be ideal for them to do something similar to Netlify and work on great themes for Hugo or other static site generators.
I'm going to guess around 99% of bloggers don't want to think at all about site creation and hosting. They want to buy/pick a theme, modify it a little, and focus on the reason they're there in the first place.
If you are going to rely on a 3rd party host why switch Blogger (which handles everything for you) with GitLab/GitHub (which requires a bit of extra maintenance from your side)?
AWS already provides hosting for static sites, as does Firebase. GitLab and GitHub both APIs. It really could be as simple as Blogger is today with little effort from Google. Building a community around static sites is nothing new. Jekyll, Hugo and many other static site generators have been doing this with embedded comments using Disqus and other providers. Hugo already provides internal shortcodes for all these features and more, as well as analytics. It is really just a matter of creating some great templates for people to start using and automating the deployment (or migration) portion of the website so that users that don't want to deal with any additional steps can do it from a single interface.
