It's much easier to setup and forget basic bare metal servers with PG/NGINX and whatnot, than it is to automate using dozens of AWS services.
People pretend that AWS doesn't cost engineers to run it, when it's IMO basically the same human cost, if not bigger as complexity grows. You just don't pay that cost upfront, but you sure do pay it later with interest.
You get stuff like HA but that's not free. You also now have to manage a new boatload of services, scripts, changing APIs, etc.
