[xyzzy123]

For backend, if you have a platform that allows you to run arbitrary containers, you will need to have a way to express how they are connected together, how much resource they should get, which parts should receive traffic from the Internet and so on. Any solution will tend to have about the same inherent complexity as kube yamls, this seems to be an iron law of devops.

IMHO the thing you have to trade off to get simplicity is generality. I agree that's probably the right tradeoff for 90% of apps, whether that's BaaS, heroku-alikes, language specific hosting or whatever.

Cloud providers are definitely keen on the idea that your web framework and your cloud platform could basically become the same thing.