They may be making this decision based on a long history of, in fact, never really having run into "a lot of time in maintenance and future headaches".

To be fair, I migrated a VPS from Linode to Hetzner a few years ago. Minor downtime is a non-issue: personal website and email server. I approximately halved the monthly cost, and I haven't had any downtime except what I caused myself when rebooting to upgrade the kernel every now and then.

As a bonus, Hetzner is European.