Devil's Advocate answer... why should someone creating a web based application ui care about the underlying operating system it's running on? I daily drive Linux personally, but TBH, for the most part, I don't care about a lot of the underlying details when working on a project, and I do care more than most.
Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.
No one is saying don't use these expensive services. My argument is that most applications don't need them and people do it anyway. It works well for a while and then suddenly you get an email saying your bill is going up 1000%.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Vercel type services are not necessarily the right answer in many cases just because it is easy to start with.
Most applications don't need more than them either. It's also easy enough to migrate off to self-hosted docker behind a load balancer if you need that as a stop-gap.
I have to agree... I really find it hard to believe that AWS themselves haven't invested more into creating a similar UX in house.
I do hope that the likes of Vercel, AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers and others start to align more from a developer perspective. I know hono.dev has worked to smooth over some of the edges a bit.
I'm also hoping to see similar efforts for other developer toolkits, I know there's several out there, but nice to see all the same. I think there may be some strides with WASM in the future too. shuttle.rs definitely looks interesting.
Even for stuff I deploy, my preference is a pretty bare host OS, and just using Caddy + Docker to deploy and reverse-proxy applications. It works fine at the small scale, and you can vertically scale a lot. But I'm not sure I would take that approach for a lot of various applications. It really just depends.