"Nowadays, startups just rent AWS servers and storage, and if they suddenly need an extra thousand servers, they just click on a link and put the cost on a credit card."
Where's this magic autoscaling link? Last I checked, AWS provided an extremely unfriendly API on top of extremely buggy services at prices that'd allow you to build your own data center with the money spent on a few months of renting VMs. They are indeed the 90's Microsoft of the cloud: incredibly expensive, buggy, and widely adopted by people that I assume burn cash to keep warm because they're so rich.
Add to that the possibility that one's account will be closed for no reason and without recourse, and you have the most unstable platform for apps imaginable.