I'd argue the barrier is just as high. I taught a ten week course in back end development and I think the students would have done equally well deploying on a VPS or Heroku.

The curriculum called for using Heroku but I regret following it now. Heroku bills itself as being easy for a beginner but go ahead and try to deploy any simple Rails or Node project using their guides. Half the time something goes wrong. Either you need extra dependencies or you have to do extra configuration that the setup instructions didn't mention. In the end you have to look up how to check the logs and even if you get that far a beginner has no clue what those logs are really saying. Even as an experienced senior developer, I couldn't get the demo project I was showing them deployed without a ton of hassle and 4 attempts.

So while it may seem like a VPS has a lot more moving parts, it's a better deal overall. Same level of confusion and complexity for students but in the end they at least know a bit about how a server works (which Heroku hides) and it's way cheaper even with SSL. I could have run that same project for $30 up front and $10 monthly.