Most of those things you listed are work arounds for having a slow server/system.

For example, if you serve your assets from the server you can skip a cors round trip. If you use an embedded database like sqlite you can shave off 50ms, use dedicated CPU (another 50ms), now you don't need to sever anything from the edge. Because your global latency is much better.

Managing a single VPS is trivial compared to AWS.