I seem to have had the opposite experience. Using Lambda (I can't speak for many of the other FaaS platforms) is so straightforward to me that there need to be some strong arguments for hosting code/containers in my projects.

My guess is that the IaC is the special sauce that's missing; you do need to go all in with some IaC solution to make using Lambda easy, but it doesn't take a lot of it to make it slick.

Cost/compute is obviously strictly worse for FaaS, but most web workloads don't _really_ need to be optimal.

If you haven't tried Azure Container Apps or GCP Cloud Run, I would strongly recommend trying them at least once deploying any standard web API app in your language of choice, just for your edification.

No adapters needed; just write a web API and ship it. Public URL gets assigned and its ready for use. Code works locally with no special adapters, emulators, or tooling needed. Need to support another cloud plat tomorrow? Ship the same container. Moving it to self-managed K8s? Same container.