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.