Self hosting nowadays is way way way way easier than you're thinking. I'm involved working with various political campaigns and the first thing I help every team do is provision a 10 year old laptop, flash linux, and setup a DDNS. A $100 investment is more than enough for a campaign of 10-20ish dedicated workers that will only be hitting this system one/two users at a time. If I can teach a random 70 year old retiree or 16 year old on how to type a dozen different commands, I'm sure a paid professional can learn too.

People need to realize that when you selfhost you can choose to follow physical business constraints. If no one is in the office to turn on a computer, you're good. Also consumer hardware is so powerful (even 10 year old hardware) that can easily handle 100k monthly active users, which is barely 3k daily users, and I doubt most SMBs actually need to handle anything beyond 500 concurrent users hardware wise. So if that's the choice it comes down to writing better and more performant software, which is what is lacking nowadays.

People don't realize how good modern tooling + hardware has come. You can get by with very little if you want.

I'd bet my years salary that a good 40% of AWS customers could probably be fine with a single self hosted server using basic plug in play FOSS software on consumer hardware.

People in our industry have been selling massive lies on the need for scalability, the amount of companies that require such scalability are quite small in reality. You don't need a rocket ship to walk 2 blocks, and it often feels like this is the case in our industry.

If self hosting is "too scary" for your business, you can buy a $10 VPS but after one single year you can probably find decade old hardware that is faster than what you pay for.

Yea, but admit that I am right that it is not that much harder to manage 100 nodes vs 10 nodes. (At least you can agree you don’t need 10x more staff to manage 100 nodes instead of 10)

That’s the key. If you need one person or 3 persons doesn’t matter. The point is the salaries are fixed costs.

I'm in your camp but I go for the cheap VPS. Lightsail and DigitalOcean are amazing -- for $10/mo or less you get a cheap little box that's essentially everything you describe, but with all the peace of mind that comes from not worrying about physical security, physical backups, dynamic IPs/DDNS, and running out of storage space. You're right that almost nobody needs most of the stuff that AWS/GCP/Azure can do, but some things in the cloud are worth paying for.