Cloud is a broad spectrum of tools. I think the Goldilocks zone is something right in between bare-ass VMs and FaaS.

If I can restart the machine and it magically resolves the underlying hardware fault (presumably by migrating me to a new host), then I am in a happy place.

Most of the other problems can be dealt with using modern tooling. I lean aggressively on things like SQLite and self-contained deployments in .NET to reduce complexity at hosting time.

When you can deploy your entire solution with a single zip file you would be crazy to go for something like K8s.

One other cloud thing that is useful is S3-style services. Clever use of these APIs can provide incredible horizontal scalability for a single instance solution. SQLite on NVMe is very fast if you are offloading your blobs to another provider.