And even then it is not strictly necessary. Cloud Run comes to mind as offering the ability to scale to zero, yet allows (maybe even requires?) maintaining the server in the application. The real benefit of "serverless" is that you no longer have to worry about the server, it being removed. Granted, that is not a big worry much these days with all the great server frameworks available.
I’d much rather write 20 lines of boilerplate code and a Dockerfile than deal with 100s lines of CDK code, distributed tracing, and the associated observability challenges.
