I'm a geek and I like to tinker with hardware. I want to maximum my $/hardware and have built a ton of DIY computers myself since I was young. I'm all about getting the most hardware for the money.

But I'd like to sleep at night and the cost of AWS is not a significant issue to the business.

That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently.

And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work.

We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K.