I want to use them because I'm not paying for it and managing your own hardware is a pain in the ass I'd rather avoid when I could just code instead. Which is not to say that using your own hardware isn't smart, but it is definitely miserable.

In my experience you swap managing your own hardware for managing intensely obtuse service configurations, pretty much 1:1. That might be preferable but I see a lot of folks approach it like the tradeoff doesn't exist.

But you don't "manage your own hardware" if you are renting VMs, which was the question here.

Also managing a cloud infrastructure is a lot more complex than running Debian and Ansible on a VM.