I do agree that the overall tendency towards cloud has made things much more complicated and expensive than they need to be in many cases. Cloud has its place, but so do simple server instances. Many projects won't reach any kind of scale that would exceed the capabilities of a medium-sized VPS. We're running a page with 600k users at work that could easily fit on a 30€ VPS. Instead, we moved to AWS and are now paying 800€ for it. No benefits whatsoever.

So yea, stick with what worked for decades if you don't see a reason not to. Also, I remember reading that StackOverflow runs on a bunch of super powerful root servers?