I think most people who’ve never experienced native NVMe for a DB are also unaware of just how blindingly fast it is. Even io2 Block Express isn’t the same.
Funny enough, the easiest way to experience this is probably to do some performance experimentation on the machine you code on. If it's a laptop made in the last few years, the performance you can get out of it knowing that it's sipping on a 45W power brick with probably not great cooling will make you very skeptical of when people talk about "scale".
To be fair, most networked filesystems are nowhere near as good as EBS. That’s one AWS service that takes real work to replicate on-prem.
OTOH, as noted, EBS does not perform as well as native NVMe and is hilariously expensive if you try. And quite a few use cases are just fine on plain old NVMe.
Thats because EBS is a network block device and not a network filesystem - that would be EFS. And with network block devices you get the same perf and better compared to EBS.
