So I'm not trying to big-time you, but I have experience across a wide range of environments and shop sizes (both in clouds and, unfortunately, people who bought the "VPSes are fine too" idea in like 2015) and, after being in these trenches for a while, "it doesn't improve developer productivity" reads more to me as "we don't know how to leverage AWS for developer productivity." Elasticity is nice; pervasive automation and deep introspective monitoring (which you don't have to create and manage and scale) is not merely nice but required, especially for small teams, because your small team cannot afford to be disrupted by systems that can't take care of themselves without kneecapping your velocity. I believe you're arguing in good faith but you're telling me that's this pebbly wall when it's actually the whole elephant.

And AWS reduces business risk, too, which needs to be understood and respected, too. Your VPS universe is not actually repeatable. It takes one line to roll out a full environment for more than one of my clients. Dev environment? Here ya go, self-serve bootstrapping and management. Prod environment? Infra-as-code guaranteed to be what you pushed to test at the infrastructural level as well as at the deployable level.

This is why we are replacing system administrators with developers and why we are replacing hands-on system creation with cloud stacks: because it's a difference of kind and the fears of higher operational expenses are trivialized by being able to use that endless inventory to replace the expensive part of your operation--the people.