If I'm honest, I do find AWS in general fairly high friction at times but it's way better than renting servers directly I think.
It's the only cloud provider I've really worked with to be honest though (other than a few experiments), maybe some others are much better in this regard?
I don't really get where you're coming from on renting servers directly, using AWS is far more expensive if you actually need a server for a while.
Though I do admit being able to fire up a server for a couple of hours and then delete it is pretty awesome.
The operational overhead of provisioning them, configuring them (and so on) is really difficult for a lot of teams though.