(4) new tech is sexy, old tech is all cranky old guys, like 30+, yuk.
Or they know how complex and error-prone it can be, and decided to spend their time on other things.
It’s good to know how that stuff works, how to configure a LB, install nginx, rack a server... the way being able to do long divisions by hand is good to know. But when you’re crunching numbers all day, it’s easier to use a calculator.
If I want to load test something for a day and spin up 20 EC2 instances and spin them down, I can do that with a script. Then I can see where my bottlenecks are and provision instances, load balancers, increased disk IOPS, etc. as appropriate and tear everything down I don't need.
But as far as "vendor lock-in", it's like developers wrapping database access up into a repository pattern just in case we want to change databases. In the real world, hardly anyone takes on massive infrastructure changes to save a few dollars.
On the other hand, there are frameworks like Serverless and Terraform to build infrastructure in a cloud vendor neutral method.
In 2008 we had racks of servers we were leasing and that were sitting idle most of the time just so we could stress test our Windows Mobile apps.
I've been developing professionally for 20 years and 10 years before that as a hobbyist. I know what a pain it is to get hardware for what you need when your company has to manage all of its own infrastructure.
Just setting up EC2 instances and installing software on them doesn't reduce the pain by much. Sure you're cutting down on your capex but you still end up babysitting servers or doing the "undifferentiated heavy lifting", I would much rather stand up a bunch of RDS instances.
As far as serverless, why manage servers at all when you can just either create a Lambda function for the lightweight stuff or deploy Docker images with Fargate? That's just one less thing to manage and you can concentrate on development
All the parts are easily replaced or scaled however you see fit. Your function can be in any language that can respond to http on any platform you want. You can put whatever proxy you want in front to define your routes. You can get as simple or complicated as you want.
Serverless is not serverless, you are just abstracted away from it.
[EDIT] I would add that personally I would spin you a cluster of Flynn on Digital Ocean :)
And lambdas aren’t just about responding to http requests, they are also used to respond to messages, CloudWatch events, files being written to S3, etc. I would hate to have to stand up servers for that. Even if you don’t want to get “locked in” to Lambda, why not serverless Docker?