It's Been a While...
I finally figured out how I want to deploy these notes. I found a tool recently called obsidian digital garden and it allows me to use the existing obsidian vault that I have but then I can mark only the pages I want to publish inside it. It works as a plugin so it's very similar in functionality to the builtin/paid obsidian publish feature.
Except this one is backed by github+vercel instead of obsidian. I still need to connect all these notes better and add more content but that will only happen with time and consistently coming back to this. We'll see if that happens...