You moved because you did not understand how to run AWS wisely.
I'm convinced Google's infrastructure play will ultimately win the hearts and minds of developers because they understand this.
For most, it depends on the risk of an issue (mostly measured ad-hoc by how many times you hear of others having an issue) vs the potential pain one would feel if an issue arises.
For a business's core infrastructure, I've heard enough so that the risk is high enough, when taken together with the potential loss of everything, that I make it a point to spend time and effort to understand as much as I can about what I rely on.
For walking down the sidewalk, no one is suggesting that you understand the fundamentals of concrete curing. The risk of something happening to you must be practically zero, and the potential harm if something does also seems quite low.
Of course, there's always going to be a success story in the midst of the crowd where someone flew by the seat of their pants and everything worked out.
I happen to think that's a minority, and I also don't feel comfortable gambling with my business like that. But to each their own.
If GCP can bring 80% of the benefits of AWS at a reasonable price for shops without the requirement of deep AWS & devops expertise, isn't that a really excellent place to occupy?
People here often seem to have an implicit assumption that AWS's complexity is either inevitable or inherently of value. I'd point to Azure as another alternative rejection of that viewpoint that serves a wider audience of technical skill levels than GCP. And honestly, I really like working with Azure.
I've built a few businesses on AWS now, and I know and trust it. But it has a ton of infuriating features and many many things they've promised have been delayed years. I'm not opposed to a new CSP at all. Why would anyone be?
AWS IAM policies are a good example - yes they are complicated and hard to navigate, but when you need to do complicated grants of access to your resources, then you'll appreciate the complication.
If you are part of a larger business with an established system administration function, then the flexibility of AWS is probably appealing, because you can transpose your existing set-ups and practices on to it.
For smaller organizations, particularly new "cloud-native" ones that may have never owned a server and might not have big administration teams, AWS looks like a bad fit.
Learning AWS is now more complicated and a bigger time investment than any technology that I've encountered for years. We operations people are used to doing a lot of learning up-front for gnarly and sometimes old tech, but it's not how developers engage with new platforms today.
If GCP can deliver the 80% without the huge time investment that mastering AWS now requires then over time, it's going to win the green-field projects.