Honestly, this article presents a fairly ridiculous comparison. You could bump deploy times on Heroku to 20 minutes and I would still use it without a second thought. At best, I'll complain a little louder.

Here's step 1 from the article: The documentation says to create a new AWS IAM role with credentials for automation.

At this point, you've already failed. You are forcing more complexity on me than I have to care about when using Heroku. And the underlying complexity is worse. You need to be familiar with Gitlab's CI/CD pipelines. Your included YAML file hides all the complexity and uses all your magic variables: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/5-minute-production-app/deploy...

What happens when something breaks?

Quite literally, the only downside of Heroku is the pricing. Even that, I question for smaller teams where operational overhead can get way worse. I have yet to come across anything in the ballpark.

Anyway, this may still be a decent setup for deploying an app to AWS perhaps, but comparing to Heroku in the title is way off base.