It's less about the modernity of SSDs and more about a fundamental difference: all persistent storage on AWS is actually networked - it's exposed to you as NVME but it's actually on a SAN and all IO requests go over the network.

You can get actual direct-attached SSDs on EC2 (and I'd expect performance to be on-par with Hetzner), but those are ephemeral and you lose them on reboot.

Wow, that's crazy, I was wondering why the numbers I were seeing on AWS were so much worse. I assumed it was the drive modernity. But network makes a lot more sense.

Thanks for the insight!