of course, people don't have the bucks to shell out for that. I get it.
they don't know better. Don't forget what the base of most Wordpress and Drupal setups is - people with barely enough skill to do a FTP push, download and install a theme from Themeforest and done.
or they can't pay because nearly every US startup/service accepts credit cards only (which is not widespread in Europe) and no one really trusts Paypal.
Considering the audience of HN, I am astounded by the amount of people who complain about a PHP package being on Composer, yet they all use NodeJS, Go, and other things that require more than modern PHP and Composer does.
A managed hosting company does something important for you. They manage!
For the average user, this is something they need if they want to start a small business or a website for a project and want to have SSL while doing so. Integrating this with some form of tutorial for the average user makes this tool amazing.