[cnorthwood]

It's not just "1 single VM" though, as you'll have to configure the applications on top of that. Configuring/installing a Postgres instance on a VM, nginx for your load balancers, iptables for your firewall, user accounts, an application server (could be as simple as forever for a NodeJS app, or Gunicorn or something for Python, etc). And if you want to automate that (as it sounds like you do), you're still writing a bunch of Ansible and Terraform. I'm not sure that it is any easier or less time consuming, unless you already know one way and not the other, and have to bake in time to learn to one approach.

[Scarbutt]

You don't have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You can still use AWS firewall, RDS, S3 and ELB with a VM/EC2 instance.