I don't find the maintenance burdensome. I keep my software up to date, including Git, so this isn't an argument against SVN. And I run a weekly backup script that first checks the integrity of the repositories. (This check was motivated by a hard drive failure which caused a small amount of data loss. Git probably would have helped in this case, but now I think I'm good.) I haven't done much anything else specifically for SVN in the past 5 years.
To be fair, most of my issues were with Apache, not SVN itself. The most egregious thing I remember was that Apache changed configuration directives twice during the time I maintained it in a way that broke my SVN server, but there were plenty of other papercuts.
This was also during SVN's heydey. I'm sure it's much more stable now. ;-)
With git you don't need a server at all, your full repository is locally stored and you can just back it up like you do everything else.