When you're uninformed and don't know what you're facing, things seem complicated and cloud solutions tend to look very attractive but what is so hard about running a web app?
For sake, just spin up a single server somewhere cheaper and run it all in there and vertically scale up after you've put the appropriate monitoring to know when you need to scale up.
I agree with you. As counterpoint, I was embarassed for our profession when something like 70% of people in the industry said they were confused with the syntax for httpd.conf
