The vast majority of companies have one if not more DevOps/infrastructure engineers on payroll. The "people costs" only realistically works either for super-early stage companies where the founding engineer(s) also manage the infra or something that's simple and standard enough that it can run on a fully-managed PaaS such as Heroku.

But hey if you're gonna bring up people costs, shouldn't the simpler stack (because it doesn't need to autoscale) mean less management & maintenance overhead anyway?