For me, cloud VPSs are the most abstraction I'm comfortable with. I can reason about what's going on and there is not a new article each week telling me how fly this, micro vms that, that are cool but to me unnecessary. Hosted? Dedicated server, Cloud VPS and at maybe a lambda. If I want complexity liek k8s, I want to set it up myself so I understant and control every bit of it, and the downsides are obvious to me because I can look at the code, not hidden behind marketing speak.