For this case your analogy is way-off this topic, you focused on age/old rather than what GraphQL cool offer... The correct analogy will be something like: Why do i need to lend a machine that only builts another machine on his own premises?
The reason I host on AWS is because I don't have the space, power, or time to set up machines locally and scale them as needed. And I definitely don't have time to manage them. What doesn't make sense about paying for additional levels of tooling? In many cases, the economy of scale actually makes it cheaper, not just convenient.
I once watched a show about a man who was obsessed with saving money. He saw some spilled uncooked rice on the ground, and sat there picking up the individual grains for probably about 20 minutes. He was extremely self-satisfied, and thought less of people who weren't able to be so financially responsible as him, not passing up a chance to get some "free" rice. Meanwhile, the task valued his time at probably 20 cents an hour.
Before starting Graphcool I was the tech person on various projects and low-tech startups. For each new project I would spin up a node server + db. After 2 years I saw myself managing 10 different installations, all with slightly different configurations, different approaches to api and authorisation etc.
Had Graphcool existed back then I would have had 10 separate projects that I could switch between in a beautiful ui, all fully managed and using the same api structure. Instead I find myself today partly responsible for the 4 remaining node installations that are the teams rely on, but don't have the expertise to manage in-house.
> Why do i need to lend a machine that only builts another machine on his own premises?
You could just spend money/time to build the machine yourself. Right?
> they got your back as longest you paid them to
Yeah, vendor lock-in is a problem, but depending on the size of your operation it might make sense.
With GraphQL based solutions it's less of a problem though.