It amazes me that onion sites aren’t everywhere. They are easy to spin up, you don’t have to pay anything and can run it from your own home. No need to purchase a domain, worry about expiration, have an open port. Built-in DoS protection. Anonymity and authentication by default. No need to configure HTTPS. Sure, uptime is on you and there is some latency/bandwidth limits to be considered, but once you are over that, onions are a solution to many problems and the benefits are enormous.
There are sites like Ahmia that you can submit your site to and which attempts to do indexing. People who run .onion sites should also do webrings like what were popular in the mid-1990’s. I remember seeing those all the time on the original Geocities. Starting a .onion site is easy to do with software like OnionShare.