Most people I talk to or see online discussing their Digital Ocean usage just use their VPS.

Yes they offer managed databases and kubernetes, but these are newer offerings. I of course don't know how well used they are, but I never see or hear anybody talking about them.

I use them for all my stuff when I'm not on company time, and the reason is because I can just be like "spin me up a Debian box," which I cannot easily do on the things folks typically describe as cloud providers.

I think the terminology is confusing. If I quote Wikipedia, which should never be done: "Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user".

I personally refer to servers as "cloud" only if they have auto-scaling and usually to services such as AWS or GCP instead of VPSs such as DO, Linode, Vultr, etc.