> At places with basically no platform team, no advanced cloud setup etc, I as a dev could understand everything, and deploying mostly meant getting my jar file or whatever running on some ec2 instance.

With an ec2 instance, how do you, for example, update the Java version? Store the database password? Add URLs the service is served at? If it’s done manually how do you add a second instance or upgrade the os?

Though, I agree the infra setups are usually overly complicated, and using a “high-level” service such as Heroku or one of its competitors for as long as possible, and even longer, is usually better, especially for velocity.