A runtime is notably NOT infrastructure, had you said instruction set you might have landed closer to making a compelling argument, but the whole point is that AWS (and other providers) abstract away the underlying infrastructure and allow the developers to as I said, have "little care of the infrastructure it runs on". There is often advanced networking that CAN be configured, as well as other infrastructure components developers can choose to configure.

Unless the engineer takes steps to spin down EC2 infrastructure after execution, it is absolutely persistent compute that you're billed for whether you are doing actual processing or not. Whereas lambda and other services are billed only for execution time.