[chadash]

Required? No, I'm not saying that. But yes, it's become the industry standard. If you don't know some AWS basics and you are a generalist web developer, you'd probably do well to learn them in order to make yourself a more marketable engineer.

There are plenty of good alternatives, but AWS is the 800-pound gorilla. You have to know at least a little bit about it in order to know why not to use it.

It's like saying you don't want to use React/Angular/Vue for your web app. There are good reasons not to, but at this point you should at least have some experience with web frameworks before making a technical decision not to use them. If your answer is "I don't know them and I don't want to learn them", that's fine for a personal project, but probably not a reason not to use them at your full-time startup. If your reason is "I know React, but for my specific use case, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS is better" then you are making a more informed decision.

[hotpotamus]

I suppose my problem is that the enormous complexity paired with the utility billing feels like I'm trying to drink from a pool of water surrounded by enormous lurking predators (the 800-pound gorilla analogy seems apt). I think everyone has at least a story of a forgotten instance that billed them a bit more, but with "infinitely scalable" compute come infinitely scalable bills. There are instances of developers creating infinite loops in cloud functions that result in 6 figure AWS bills. Of course then the advice is to plead your case and hope for a credit, but I wouldn't expect everlasting benevolence from Bezos's machine.

I have other issues and could probably expound on them at length, but work to do and all that. I don't disagree with you that it's an important tool for engineers today (I've certainly got an account or two), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.