Is it? If you compare to serverless, you'd almost have to compare AWS EKS Fargate and with that, there's a lot less operational overload. You still have to learn ingress, logging, networking, etc. but you'd have to do that with serverless as well.
I'd argue between AWS serverless and AWS EKS fargate, the initial complexity is about the same. But serverless is a lot harder to scale cost efficiently and not accidentally go wild with function or sns loops.
This is my experience too. We served fairly complex data requests, around 200,00 per day, for mobile and commercial users using ECS Fargate and Aurora Postgres as our main technologies and it coped fine.
Used Golang and optimised our queries and data structures and rarely needed more than 2 of whatever the smallest ECS Fargate task size is, but if we did it scaled in and out without any issues.
Realise that isn't at scale for some but it's probably a relatively common point for a lot of use cases.
We put some effort into maintenance, mostly ensuring we kept on an upgrade path but barely touched the infrastructure code other than that.
One thing we did do was limit the number of other AWS services we adopted and kept it fairly basic. Seen plenty of other teams go down the rabbit hole.
This is one thing that REALLY frustrates me about enterprise. So often the c-suite wants to push for going cloud platforms (aws, azure, snowflake, along with all the costs, "because they need it". It's this narrative of scale that drives these discussions - so few companies are genuinely dealing with 200,000 requests per day!
Genuine question - have you come across good/useful case studies/summaries of going cloud?
All I can really get is "pretty toys", "everyone is going cloud", "we don't need to have network engineers (we now need azure network engineers)", etc.
I'd argue between AWS serverless and AWS EKS fargate, the initial complexity is about the same. But serverless is a lot harder to scale cost efficiently and not accidentally go wild with function or sns loops.