[JackRabbitSlim]

Not "Best Practice" according to whom? Cloud vendors selling lock-in services? From an architectural perspective how is a bare VM at a remote data center worse than indeterminate/unknown intermedate layers of a proper "cloud" provider that is still in the same remote data center with the same hops and latency?

That "very small set of primitives" is enough to build the cloud vendors themselves so how exactly is that a limiting factor?

If I seem overtly hostile I don't mean it that way. I am just genuinely curious for an extended explanation. In it's current form it sounds down right marketing tautology to my ears.

[QuinnyPig]

For a lot of workloads, higher level services offer more bang for buck along the axes that matter. For a small real world example, I could run Wordpress myself on a VM for a fraction of what I pay WPengine, but it's way better for everyone if I pay WPengine instead and get on with doing the things that move the needle on my business.

Scaled up, you can consider the equivalent to be using managed database offerings, message queues, load balancers, etc. There's more value to me in spending time on the differentiated things that drive the value I provide to my customers than me implementing a crappy shadow of DynamoDB or BigQuery myself.